This study examines the functions of the bilingual discourse strategy of language alternation in the process of marking boundaries of continuous discourse. The focus is on switched discourse markers – employed, it is argued, to metalanguage the frame of the discourse. The corpus is comprised of audio recordings of over 20 hours of Hebrew-English bilingual conversation. The strategy of language alternation at discourse markers is illustrated, and the switched discourse markers are classified according to Becker's approach to context (1988b) as a source of constraints on text. This classification is then related to the phenomenon of clustering of discourse markers at discourse unit boundaries in both bilingual and monolingual discourse. Finally, cross-linguistic differences in discourse markers are related to a theory of metalanguage. (Discourse analysis, bilingual discourse, discourse markers, languaging, metalanguage, Hebrew/English comparative discourse)

A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence that eh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers. Young Pakeha women, though, seem to be the next highest users of eh. It is unlikely that they are using it to signal in-group identity in the same way; instead, it is possible that they are responding to its interpersonal and affiliative functions for Maori men, and are adopting it as a new facet in their repertoire of positive politeness markers. (Gender, ethnicity, politeness, New Zealand English, intergroup and interpersonal communication)

The communal creation of religious meaning is here examined in the context of an Irish Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting. Through a micro-analysis of the “spontaneous” ritual language of one such meeting, various discursive strategies are revealed which function to create for the participants an experience of divine/human communication. These include an explicit effort on the part of speakers to construct a thematically consistent and coherent ritual event out of a sequence of apparently spontaneous individual speech acts, as well as a marked use of evidentials to attribute spiritual authorship and authority to personal speech acts. In contrast to what has been suggested as the self-evident nature of ritual speech, the frequent use of evidentials is related to the relatively recent emergence of the movement, its ideology, and its emphasis on the personal narrative as the central form of religious discourse. (Ritual language, evidentials, Catholic religion, charismatic religion, religious movements, authority in discourse)

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of appropriation is a potentially powerful way to conceptualize discourse development in children. Typically, studies of discourse development have emphasized structural aspects of text. However, children appropriate not only forms, but also words, themes, purposes, and styles. From a developmental point of view, the concept of appropriation raises at least three questions: What is it that children appropriate? Where do they get their material? And what do they do with that material? In an attempt to make sense of appropriation as a developmental construct, we examine one third-grader's writing: Suzanne's book, The missing piece. We find that Suzanne appropriated material from two major sources: (a) adult-authored text – Margaret Sidney's novel, Five little Peppers and how they grew – and (b) the meanings and values of a stratified local peer culture. We conclude by discussing the significance of this work for future research on children's discourse development. (Discourse development, Mikhail Bakhtin, peer culture, social context of writing, children's writing, appropriation)

This article describes a preliminary experiment looking at possible differences in how females and males interact in conversation. The article analyzes data from an experiment where two females and two males talked to each other in all possible pairs; a total of 60 minutes of conversation (six dyads) was transcribed. The goal was to isolate quantifiable entities related to controlling or directing the conversation. We looked at issues such as who talked how much, how fluently or confidently – and how the two people in the conversation interacted in terms of interruptions and indications of support, agreement, or disagreement. The findings from such a small sample are only relevant to suggest hypotheses for further research. However, we noticed a number of interesting differences: the female speakers used more 1st person pronouns and fewer 3rd person references than the male speakers; the female speakers used mm hmm at a much higher frequency than the male speakers; the female speakers also interrupted each other more; and the female/female conversation seemed more fluent than the other conversations, as measured by number of disfluencies and number of affirmative transitions upon speaker change. All of these differences suggest that this area is a fruitful one for further investigation. (Conversational analysis, gender differences)