The function of apologies is discussed within the context of a model of interaction with two intersecting dimensions – affective and referential meaning. Apologies are defined as primarily social acts conveying affective meaning. The syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of apologies are described, based on a corpus of 183 apologies. While apology exchanges divided equally between those which used a combination of strategies and those where a single strategy sufficed, almost all apology exchanges involved an explicit apology. An account is provided of the kinds of social relationships and the range of offenses which elicited apologies in this New Zealand corpus.

Apologies are politeness strategies, and an attempt is made to relate the relative “weightiness” of the offense (assessed using the factors identified as significant in Brown and Levinson's model of politeness) to features of the apology strategies used to remedy it. Though some support is provided for Brown and Levinson's model, it is suggested that Wolf-son's “bulge” theory more adequately accounts for a number of patterns in the data. In particular, the functions of apologies between friends may be more complex than a simple linear model suggests. (Apologies, politeness, speech functions, New Zealand English, sociolinguistics, pragmatics)

The effects of language policies on the symbolic value of the linguistic repertoire merit consideration in needed studies of the consequences of language status planning. Since achieving political autonomy within Spain in 1979, Catalonia has instituted a number of policies, particularly in education, to enhance the status and use of Catalan. A matched guise test was conducted among students in Barcelona in 1980 and again in 1987 to gauge changes in attitudes toward Catalan and Castilian. Conflict between positive status and negative solidarity values of Catalan for nonnative speakers found in 1980 appears to be resolved in 1987. Three aspects of public language policy have attenuated ethnic constraints against nonnative use of Catalan, but further changes in social relations may be necessary to alter patterns of language choice. (Language attitudes, language policy, Catalonia)

In this article, we examine the way citizens' descriptions of troublesome occurrences in reports to emergency dispatch personnel are vulnerable to suspicion and doubt. The vulnerability of description in these cases involves callers' categorization of, visual or aural access to, and involvement in the reported “trouble.” It is through displays of what we term practical epistemology – displays of how one has come to know about a particular event – that these vulnerabilites emerge and are tested and negotiated in the request for and dispatch of emergency assistance. (Conversation analysis, language in institutional settings, pragmatics)

This article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the natural semantic metalanguage that she has developed over the last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland's history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics. (Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, language of propaganda, expressive language)

People sometimes extend invitations they don't intend to be taken seriously. We call these ostensible invitations. From a collection of spontaneous examples, we argue that they require: a pretense of sincerity by the speaker; mutual recognition of the pretense by speaker and addressee; collusion on the pretense by the addressee; ambivalence by the speaker about its acceptance; and an off-record purpose by the speaker. We describe seven techniques speakers use in fulfilling these requirements. We also show that speakers try to achieve their off-record purpose by getting addressees to recognize the expectable effects of the invitation, the situation, and the fact that they chose to extend an ostensible invitation. Finally, we argue that ostensible invitations are part of a class of ostensible speech acts, and these in turn are related to other types of nonserious language use. (Speech acts, pragmatics, off record, pretense, nonserious language use)

Nonstandard language varieties typically become social markers of the social groups that use them. Through this connection, the varieties reflect commonly held stereotypes of those groups from the perspective of outsiders, as well as symbolize group membership for their speakers. This study employs the matched guise technique to compare attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standard American English held by speakers of both language varieties. Most studies of nonstandard language varieties have shown an acceptance by nonstandard speakers of dominant negative stereotypes of their groups. By varying content of speech samples evaluated, this study suggests that speakers of Appalachian English partially accept low status evaluations of their dialect, but reject other negative stereotypes of their speech community in terms of integrity and social attractiveness of its members. In particular, results suggest significantly higher evaluations of male speakers of Appalachian English that are shared by Standard English speakers. (Appalachian English, speech community, language variety, language markers, language stereotypes, dialects, social status)

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of 1,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance. These findings are set within a broader discussion of male–female differences in speech and the sociology of compliment work. Parallels are drawn between these sex-based differences and differences in norms for national varieties of English relating to the function and frequency of compliments as speech acts and to different response types elicited by diverse functional exploitations of compliment formulas in discourse. (Sex-based differences in language use, socioprag-matics, compliments/compliment responses, ethnography of speaking)

From the hypothesis that routine formulae code cultural norms, it follows that social change will reveal itself in the formulaic inventory of a language. We test this prediction by looking at some of the changes to formulaic speech which took place in postrevolutionary China, particularly during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We first examine some generally used politeness formulae, comparing them with prerevolutionary equivalents. We then examine the Public Criticism Meeting as a revolutionary ritual and show that its structure and formulaic language arose directly out of revolutionary imperatives. We attribute the changes in the formulaic inventory of Chinese directly to the need to code new social facts, although old social norms can also be discerned in the new formulae, thus showing that social changes are built on a previous social order. (Oral formulaic performance, routine formulae, situational constraints, Cultural Revolution)

The evidence is practically unequivocal that left-branching (LB) sentences are more difficult to process than right-branching (RB) sentences. In this study, the hypothesis was tested that LB sentences are judged to be more formal than RB ones and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB ones. Three groups of subjects, university students in England, Wales, and the United States, ordered three versions of 18 sentences in terms of their formality. LB and CB sentences were considered more formal than RB ones by all three groups of students. LB and CB types did not differ from each other. In a second study, American students choose from the group of three sentences the one they would say to a formal listener (professer/employer) or to an informal listener (brother/sister or close friend). RB sentences were attributed to informal listeners and LB and CB sentences, to formal listeners. (Grammar, formality, sociolinguistics)

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education)

This study examines the use of words per pause (W/P) as a practical means for identifying solidarity in everyday conversation. Eight listeners recorded the narratives of a female and a male, either friends or strangers. Ten speakers were categorized as friends and six as strangers; they talked about a good and a bad experience. Average reliability of coding pauses was .83. The results indicated a statistically significant difference in W/P of speakers who were friends and those who were strangers. Statistical results support the conclusion that friends are more likely to employ many W/P and strangers few W/P. One practical implication of this study is that W/P can be employed by researchers with relative ease and a high degree of reliability for investigations of speaking style in a variety of contexts. A second practical implication is that W/P is a diagnostic device that can serve as a social litmus test in everyday conversation to identify the expression of sympathy and estrangement. (Expressive language, nonverbal communication, paralanguage, pauses, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, solidarity, speech and personality)

As doctors and patients communicate during medical interactions they both offer accounts and respond to them. By treating these accounts as interactional strategies which link social structure to social interaction we display how the medical interview is characterized by a moment-to-moment battle that mirrors and largely sustains the institutional authority and status of doctors and the reality of genders. (Medicine, communication, accounting practices, interactional strategies, institutional authority, professional status, gender)

Under certain circumstances, contextualization cues become powerful means of achieving social order. The social organization of a daily group meeting in an American primary grade classroom is closely examined. Participants recurrently generate certain contexts within the meeting in varying sequence from day to day. Transitions from one to another regularly occur smoothly and unremarkably as interaction unfolds. On some occasions, however, this does not happen. Order breaks down, and the teacher and students implicitly negotiate what the context will be. On the surface, these contrasting patterns seem to arise unpredictably as students choose either to “behave” or “misbehave.” That is how the teacher accounts for them. Nevertheless, a closer analysis shows that they are explainable with reference to some subtle contextualization cues that the teacher, without being consciously aware of it, routinely provides but occasionally omits at context boundaries. Students routinely act on the presence and absence of these cues, which thus become a tacit, jointly constructed means of discourse regulation and social control. Their inadvertant “omission” becomes a recurrent source of interactional trouble. (Context, contextualization cues, classroom discourse, ethnography of speaking)

We examined the effect of general statements against sexist usage in the style manual for The Washington Post. We selected a minor usage pattern that was not the subject of an explicit rule, namely, the difference in the use of a middle initial in references to men and to women. This usage was taken as an index of the possible effect of a general policy statement on newswriting practice. We found significantly less difference by sex in this usage subsequent to the publication of the style manual. We take the difference as support for the effectiveness of language planning in this instance, although the significance of our results as evidence of real equality of treatment remains somewhat problematic. There are different points of view in sociolinguistics about the relative value of quantitative versus more directly interpretive methods. We present in some detail the reasoning behind the use of quantitative methods to support an investigation such as ours. (Language planning, language treatment, language and sex, language and the media, style and usage, forms of reference, statistical methods)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985, 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. They fail because they ignore hierarchical power. Their failure “abroad” must be seen as an invitation to reflect on their alleged success back home. (Discourse, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, Hindi, Indian English, English, sociolinguistics)