An Introduction to the Edward Sapir centenary session at the November 1984 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, Colorado, with remarks read at the 1984 Linguistic Society of America meetings (Baltimore, Maryland) on the occasion of the Sapir lecutre given by Professor Emmon Bach, University of Massachusetts (28 December 1984).

In the reporting of a situation or event, a speaker can sometimes be seen to have omitted or ‘glossed over’ a constituent component. There are times when that component is something a speaker would rather not have the coparticipant know. Sometimes, however, the speaker is willing, indeed eager, to share this material with the coparticipant, but is constrained from simply producing it then and there (the matter being possibly bizarre, risqué, or in other ways problematic). In either case, whether the problematic component is delivered or not (i.e., whether a ‘gloss’ is ‘unpackaged’) can depend upon what the coparticipant does. This report focuses on the ways in which a coparticipant's activities are implicated in the maintaining as-is, or unpackaging, of a ‘glossed’ component. (Sociology, psychology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics)

Previous research on children's arguments has neglected their initial phases, particularly how they arise out of children's ongoing practical activities. This paper examines how any utterance or activity can be opposed, the concept of opposition being at the center of any definition of argument. However, once opposition has occurred, it can be treated in a variety of ways, and a full-blown argument or dispute is only one possible and contingent outcome. Children analyze others's moves not only verbally, but nonverbally as well. Thus, bodily actions and presupposition are necessary components in the analysis of how arguments are started. Nonverbal oppositional moves may be at the base of semantically constructed disputes. When opposition occurs, it is to be taken to imply the violation of some rule or value. The meaning of that rule or value relative to children's culture is taken to have to do not with its content, but its usage in promoting a local social organization. (Conversational analysis, child language, social organization, presupposition, dispute genres, American English [middle class, Caucasian])

Discourse structure in Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo (CAY) narrative and conversation is examined, and a general notion of rhetorical structure is proposed, growing out of recent work in the poetics of Native American oral literature. Rhetorical structure in a given language would consist of prosodically and intonationally signaled phonological phrasing along with whatever other significant formal features consistently pattern or interact with it (minimally surface syntactic constituency, typically also the system of sentence adverbs and conjunctions, further intonational features, and patterns of parallelism and repetition). Findings for CAY as well as other works in the literature indicate at least four important communicative functions for rhetorical structure in addition to its role in verbal art: organization of information, expression of affective meaning, indexing of genre, and regulation of dialogic interaction. (Discourse, syntax–phonology–discourse interaction, ethnopoetics; Native America, Alaska, Yupik Eskimo)

Simultaneous speech is neither necessary nor sufficient for the recognition of “interruption” by interlocutors. A peaker's “completion right” is vitiated by how long she has been speaking, how often she has spoken, the number of “points” made in a speaking turn, and the special rights of some speakers to speak about some topics. There are no absolute syntactical or acoustical criteria for recognizing an occurrence of “interruption” available either to those involved in a speech event nor to analysts. (Turn taking, California English conversation)

In this study, linguistic and anthropological research methods are employed in investigating the use of one salient feature in the speech of a small community in northern Spain. Though set in rural Spain, the study is of interest both to readers with special interest in Spain and to those concerned mostly with broader possibilities of inference from linguistic data. In the first case, findings provide insight into social change experienced by generations of villagers marked by the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. In the second, data provide evidence that, in this small and relatively homogeneous community, sex and political orientation are factors that influence the use of an established sociolinguistic variable. Speech data used in the study were obtained in a series of recorded interviews conducted by the author. Material of an ethnographic nature was collected during field research over a period of approximately two years. (Linguistic variation, social motivation, Spanish dialectology, Spanish regionalism, Cantabria, montañés)

This study relates to two strands of research into children's communicative competence: the study of children's conflict behavior and the study of ritualized communicative activities through which children construct, maintain, and strategically negotiate their social world (e.g., Brenneis & Lein 19p; Lein & Brenneis 1978; Boggs 1978; Corsaro 1979; Morgan, O'Neill, & Harre 1979; Goodwin, 1980). A number of ethnographic studies have been specifically concerned with the analysis of culturally situated, ritualized, agonistic events. Notably, the series of studies concerned with the language form known as “sounding” or “playing the dozens” among black American youth in the United States (e.g., Abrahams 1962; Kochman 1972, 1981; Labov 1972; Mitchell-Kernan 1972), the study of verbal dueling among Turkish boys (Dundes, Leach, & Ozkok 1972), or the study of ritualized fighting among the Irish men of Tory Island (Fox 1977).

In this paper I attempt to show what a micro approach involving fine-grained sociolinguistic analyses has to contribute to the understanding of the causes of discrimination on grounds of race in South Africa. I present analyses of intra- and intercultural encounters involving native speakers of English and Zulu which suggest that differences in sociocultural background and discourse conventions contribute to misinterpretation of intent and misjudgement of attitude and ability. Repeated stressful encounters of this kind, I suggest, generate negative cultural stereotypes. Finally, I sketch how the larger, structural, historically given forces, which are the concern of macro studies, combine with the results of intercultural encounters to achieve a negative cycle of socially created discrimination. (Interactional sociolinguistics, culture-specific discourse conventions. intercultural communication failure and prejudice, South African English)

Differences in patterns of literacy can be understood in terms of communicative needs as governed by culturally learned notions about the appropriateness of a given communicative mode for a given social activity and by practicality as determined by biological structures and processes. It is through literacy that the deaf person can share in the linguistic experiences of the society at large, since written language is not distorted by the handicapped auditory sense. This study provides the first analysis of the ways writing is used among the deaf and between deaf and hearing communicators. Four groups were consulted and observed: the social community of deaf adults who sign, families in which parents are hearing and at least one child is deaf, families in which parents are deaf and children are hearing or deaf, deaf and hearing schoolteachers. Families with hearing parents use virtually no writing, whereas families with deaf parents and deaf adults in general use writing for several functions. The reading abilities of deaf school leavers seldom exceed fourth grade level; nevertheless, deaf adults use writing daily for exchange of information in the home, in public, on the job, and for communication by means of a telephone adaptation with a keyboard. The uses of literacy are largely conversational, personal, and instrumental. Commercial print in the form of captioned television and movies is also available. Deaf children born to deaf parents are socialized into these uses. Deaf children born to hearing parents are not. Writing which occurs in classrooms with deaf children is largely limited to lesson work, even when teachers are deaf. Literacy programs should take into account the communicative needs of deaf adults and the patterns of literacy use in deaf families. (Literacy, deafness, crosscultural analysis, ethnography of communication)

In this paper we discuss miscommunication in exchanges between native speakers and nonnative speakers of a language, focusing on an analysis of a service encounter telephone conversation between a nonnative speaker and a native speaker television repair shop employee. We present a goal-based model of conversation and a coding system for interpreting utterances, both of which are necessary for understanding the type of miscommunication which occurred in the conversation described herein. We argue that the lack of shared background on the part of the interlocutors interacted with their lack of shared linguistic code. In general, such interactions hinder successful communication and increase the probability that the miscommunication will not be recognized and thus not easily resolved. We show that a complete analysis of native/nonnative conversations must minimally invoke notions of correct interpretation, confidence in interpretation, goals of a conversation, shared beliefs, and linguistic as well as cultural systems. (Sociolinguistics, nonnative interactions, conversational analysis, American English)

This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and express the results of this analysis in a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes such a metalanguage and illustrates her approach with numerous detailed semantic analyses. She suggests that analyses of speech acts and speech genres carried out in terms of English folk labels are ethnocentric and unsuitable for crosscultural comparison. She tries to show how folk labels of speech acts and speech genres characteristic of a given language reflect salient features of the culture associated with that language, and how the use of the proposed semantic metalanguage, derived from natural language, helps to achieve the desired double goal of insight and rigor in this area of study. (Speech acts, speech genres, semantics, lexicography, language and culture)

This paper is about turn exchanges, the structure of speaking turns and the relationship of nonverbal behavior to both exchanges and turns. Its purpose is to present a conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting turn exchange and speaking turns, and data are cited when possible. First discussed are specific forms of exchange such as “smooth” and “simultaneous.” The Praguean concept of functional differentiation is invoked to argue that forms of turn exchange have indexical value. The relationship of nonverbal behavior to turn exchange is then discussed. An analysis of videotaped, dyadic interactions between strangers, “getting acquainted” conversation, is reported in order to demonstrate that the nonoverlapping exchange has structurally, hence indexically. distinct forms. These forms, defined by both verbal and nonverbal elements, are ordered in a hierarchy of pragmatic markedness. It is concluded that differentiating pragmatic markedness in conversational patterns is a powerful device for determining indexical features of conversation and thus of relevance for a semiotic understanding of everyday speech.

Pronouns and terms of address in interviews, letters, and speeches in Neues Deutschland reflect a variety of address norms. They depend on the participants' social status, geographic origin, party membership, and other factors, and show pronoun avoidance in a number of cases. Sociolinguistic methods applied to written texts can thus reveal possible changes in address norms in the German Democratic Republic. (Sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pronouns of address, language in the German Democratic Republic)

The choice of English directive variants has been hypothesized by ErvinTripp (1976, 1977) to be determined by several social and ecological factors: the relative social ranks of the speaker and recipient, their ages, their familiarity, the presence or absence of outsiders, territorial location, and task expectations. The major goal of this investigation is to test ErvinTripp's hypotheses concerning the relationship between these variables and the choice of the identified syntactically based directive variants (imperatives, imbedded imperatives, need statements), using a distinctly different sample: a predominantly black male migratory agricultural labor population in the United States's eastern seaboard region. The data indicate that the imperative form is used almost exclusively in those contexts where the syntactically based directive variants were expected to occur. Thus, most of the predictions derived from Ervin-Tripp's model for these directive variants were contradicted. The preference for imperatives is suggested to be largely a consequence of the antagonistic relationships within the migrant farm-worker community. The results of this study also suggest that the set of decision rules used in choosing among directive variants according to social criteria is a function of the following factors: crosscultural (i.e., social class and ethnic) variation, and social and physical characteristics of the interaction setting. (Directives, migrant farmworkers, cultural differences, environmental influences, ethology)

Ferguson's concept of diglossia is examined with a view to dedetermining its applicability to creole continua. The characteristics of classic instances of diglossia are subdivided into sociocultural and linguistic features, and these in turn are used as a basis for determining the extent to which different types of community might be fruitfully described as diglossic. The conclusion is drawn that creole continua share far more in common with Ferguson's defining cases of diglossia than they do not, and far more than other types of speech community. (Diglossia, Creole continua, Typology of speech communities)

This chapter [of Sociolinguistic patterns – RWF] will deal with the study of language structure and evolution within the social context of the speech community. The linguistic topics to be considered here cover the area usually named “general linguistics,” dealing with phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (Labov 1972:184). Surely, this is too narrow a conception of the role of sociolinguistic research (Romaine 1982:6).

The term “koine” has been applied to a variety of languages, only some of which are analagous in form and function to the original Greek koinē. The term “koineization” has more recently been applied to the process of levelling which may result in a koine. This article examines various definitions and usages of these terms in the literature and proposes a more precise utilization in the context of contact and resultant mixing between linguistic subsystems. (Languages in contact, language mixing, pidgin and creole studies, social psychology)