In the early 1970s, a strange piece of whimsy circulated orally in the United States. The modern joke in question concerned a ‘wide-mouth’ frog who evidently lacked the knowledge of what to feed its newborn babies. In the course of his or her attempts to question other animals about their normal regimes of infant diet, the wide-mouth frog is eventually put in the position of having to radically alter its customary speech pattern. This piece of folklore thus contains an explicitly metalinguistic aspect. Let me present representative texts of the story before discussing its possible significance.

The linguistic foundation of Bernstein's code theory is tested in a bidimensional sociolinguistic investigation. Not only class, but also situation is controlled. In the Flemish town of Maaseik each of eight informants (four middle class and four working class) have been interviewed in two different situations, one formal and one informal. In the formal situation standard Netherlandic was spoken and in the informal the local dialect. Five measures of syntactic complexity constituted the linguistic variable. The results in the formal situation corroborate those of Bernstein: the middle-class subjects exhibit a greater degree of syntactic complexity than the working-class subjects. In the informal situation all subjects exhibit about the same degree of syntactic complexity, and for the middle-class subjects this degree is less than that in the formal situation (as might be expected). The striking result is that the working-class informants exhibit significantly higher complexity in the informal situation. In the discussion these findings are compared to those of previous studies, Bernsteinian and other. In an appendix sample data for formal and informal styles from one middle- and one working-class subject are presented. (‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes, social vs. cognitive meaning, syntactic variation; Flemish cf. Maaseik, Belgium).

The analysis of videotaped naturally occurring adult—child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The analysis of the form and function of adult clarification requests demonstrated the importance of the interactive demands adults encounter when interacting with young children. The nature of these interactive demands and how adults deal with them are discussed in regard to Cicourel's (1970) notion of interpretive procedures. Finally, a discussion of the possible effects of adult interactive style on the child's development of communicative competence is presented. (Developmental sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, adult—child interaction, US English.)

French native speakers' reactions to phone calls in the United States are an indication of a difference in the norms of interaction between the two countries. This difference, in turn, is understood when one realizes that the phone call, constituting a speech event, is open to different cultural interpretations, in spite of a similarity in the physical conditions of the interaction between the caller and the answerer. (Sequencing conventional opening; cultural variability; telephone calls; France and United States.)

Although the process of scientific discovery is not fully understood, there are two aspects of it that are important. One involves such activities as theorizing, gaining insights, speculating, using intuition, and extrapolating. This part can be called ‘extension’ (in the sense of adding to current ideas). The other aspect involves collecting data, noticing patterns, identifying processes, and exhaustively describing given phenomena. This can be called ‘consolidation’ (in the sense of filling in the gaps in what is known). While linguists are always engaged in both types of activities (with different focus during different eras), within generative work there has been special emphasis on ‘extension’, on formulating theory and using intuition; indeed, this emphasis has been one of the attractions of generative grammar. Complementary to this emphasis on extension there has been developing an increased interest in ‘consolidation’, in doing field work and conducting phonological experiments, for example. My purpose here is to discuss experimental phonology as a consolidative activity, and to show how the consolidative function of experiments puts special requirements on the way they are run. A secondary purpose is to place consolidative work within a moderately general framework.

The present review surveys the current state of sociolinguistic studies in the USSR, though due reference is made to papers on the sociology of language published as early as the 1920s.

The following trends of Soviet sociolinguistics are distinguished and discussed: (1) general theory and methodology; (2) socially motivated changes in modern Russian during the post-Revolutionary period; (3) development and mutual impact of different languages spoken in the USSR; (4) standard language as opposed to dialects; (5) non-standard language subsystems (group and professional slang, popular, non-prestige and colloquial speech, etc.); (6) language standardization and codification; (7) a study of pronouncing, morphological, and lexical variants; (8) problerns of language policy; (9) sociolinguistic aspect of functional stylistics; (10) sociolinguistic aspect of inter-personal communication; (11) mass interviewing of speakers and methods of the interview.

The review is supplied with a bibliography index.