The different taxonomies of illocutionary acts proposed by Austin, Searle, Vendler, Ohmann, and Fraser are compared in summary form, with Searle's taxonomy taken as a reference standard. All five of these taxonomies slight two kinds of illocutionary act: (I) illocutionary acts that combine commissive with directive illocutionary force (e.g., offering, inviting, challenging), and (2) illocutionary acts that require two participants (e.g., giving, selling, contracting). These and related speech acts are discussed in some detail, and Searle's classification is amended to take them into account. (Speech acts, Austin, Searle, law, contracts, English.)

In order to find out if more women than men use rising intonation when they answer questions to which only they have the answer, 154 men and 16 women were approached by either a male or a female interviewer and asked either where they were born or what their favorite color was. Both sexes used straight rising intonation rarely and equally. Women used a rise–fall–rise pattern more than men only when they were approached by a female interviewer. The ‘meaning’ to the speakers themselves of the three contours used is difficult to ascertain since lexical frames provided by some speakers often contradicted the meanings previously attributed to the contours by other writers.

Listeners' associations with the contours were tested with a matched guise tape of three male and three female voices each using each of three contours produced during the interviews (straight fall, straight rise, and rise–fall–rise). Listeners associated simpler rises with more stereotypically feminine attributes; they associated the female voices with feminine attributes regardless of the contour used; and they associated both male and female voices with more stereotypically feminine attributes when the speakers used the straight rise contour. In light of the lack of production evidence in this study to account for the source of these 30 listeners' associations of terminal rises with feminine attributes, some other possibilities are proposed to account for the associational ties. (Sex differences in speech, language attitudes.)

Over the last few years the methods and techniques used in sociolinguistics have aroused keen interest and have continually been improved. Yet the claims that have been made about differences of degree between the language used by women and that used by men are often based on research methods which seem to be anything but reliable. On the basis of a corpus of 587 utterances produced in buying a train ticket, an investigation was made of whether there is a statistically significant difference between women and men in certain aspects of their language use which have been mentioned in the literature: the number of words used to deal with a set task, diminutives, civilities, forms of language expressing insecurity (repetitions, hesitations, self-corrections, requests for information). In addition to the independent variable of sex of speaker, three other variables were introduced: sex of addressee, age of speaker, and time of ticket purchase (rush-hour or normal). The results of our investigation indicate that there are few significant differences between the language used by women and that used by men in this particular situation, with regard to the variables mentioned above. As a consequence, this investigation has demonstrated once again that intuitions should be considered critically. It is remarkable, however, that sex of addressee seems to affect almost all of the variables under consideration. Consequently, the results strongly suggest that anyone who wants to investigate language by means of interviews must take into account the fact that the kind of language used does not depend only on the informant, but just as much on the addressee. (Language and sex, investigation methods, influence of addressee on speaker.)

An examination of recent changes in the color terminology of a Lurispeaking pepole in Iran shows a strong cultural basis of perception, categorization, and manipulation of colors. Compared to the familiar evolutionary model of the development of color categories, this case constitutes a slight deviation in the position of the colors brown and purple and suggests a qualification of the respective evolutionary stages as well as an expansion of the model's predictive hypotheses. (Color terms, evolutionary universals in linguistic change, Lur language, Iran.)