Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in trial cross-examination. Using Goffman's notion of footing, the article examines how both prosecutor and defendant mobilize direct and indirect quotes, repetitive parallelism, epistemic modality, counterfactuals, evidentiality, sequencing, and specialized tokens of the medical register to contextualize shifting into and departing from an expert identity. I would like to thank the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago for financial help. Don Lance (as always) and Richard Cameron provided detailed comments and guidance throughout the course of writing. Thanks are due to Wayne Kerstetter, Mike Maltz, Pat McAnany, Joe Peterson, and Sarah Ullman for comments at an early presentation. Finally, I deeply appreciate the very detailed comments of Elizabeth Mertz and W. M. O'Barr, which I have tried to incorporate as much as possible.

This article proposes the adoption of Goffman's concept of “framing” to characterize irony across its forms; the suggestion that this framing is achieved by a shift of footing reveals links between verbal irony and other forms of talk. Examination of irony in conversation shows how the shift of footing allows for detachment, enabling the ironist to make evaluations in response to perceived transgressions with reference to common assumptions. It is both the construction of an ironic turn and its placement in a sequence that make for the discernible shift of footing, and thus the visibility of the frame; with irony, conversational expectations of what constitutes a next turn are fulfilled on the level of form, but undermined on the level of content. This analysis shows the extent to which irony is affiliative, and reveals its hitherto unacknowledged subtlety of effect and range of attitude. I am most grateful to David Britain, Anita Pomerantz, Ad Putter, and Andrew Spencer for helpful discussions and useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Paul Drew, David Good, and Rachael Harris also read versions of my work, when it formed part of a Ph.D. thesis on conversational misunderstandings, and offered invaluable guidance. I am, in addition, deeply indebted to an anonymous referee from Language in Society whose observations on an earlier draft prompted me to reconsider my presentation of certain issues, particularly with regard to the work of John Haiman. Many ensuing improvements in clarity are owed to this referee. The study would have been impossible without the conversational data; the extent of my debt to those who supplied them will be evident to anyone reading this. My thanks to all.

Sociologists typically assume that immigrants' acquisition of English as a second language follows the opportunities and motivations to become proficient in English, while many linguists argue that second language acquisition may be governed by maturational constraints, possibly biologically based, that are tied to the age at onset of language learning. In this article, I use U.S. census data to investigate the relationship between age at onset of second language learning and levels of English language proficiency among foreign-born adults in the United States. The overarching conclusion is that proficiency in a second language among adults is strongly related to age at immigration. Part of that relationship is attributable to social and demographic considerations tied to age at entry into a new country, and part may be attributable to maturational constraints. Many colleagues, spread across several disciplines, provided valuable comments on this research. Among them were Cynthia Fisher, Nancy Garrett, Susan Gonzo, John Hagan, Charles Hirschman, Tim F. Liao, Michael Long, John Mardeen, Madonna Harrington Meyer, C. Gray Swicegood, and Jack Veugeler.

This new textbook has upper-level undergraduate and graduate students for a focal audience. But as Duranti makes clear in his preface and first chapter, he aims neither at a synoptic presentation of the field's major paradigms, nor at a comprehensive review of its interdisciplinary significances. Duranti's selective foregrounding of topics and linkages makes for only a partial fit between this book's substance and the expectation of a “textbook treatment” which its title might raise. His purpose is instead to present the first accessible, generalized treatment of (culturally contextualized) conversation analysis at the juncture of ethnography and formal language description. As such, it is a welcome addition to the pedagogic literature.

This unusual and ambitious book attempts to define a field both more narrow and more broad-ranging than linguistic anthropology: the field of “language and culture studies.” Like a number of other recent works, including Duranti 1997, Bonvillain 1997, Salzmann 1998, and even the edited volume of Brenneis & Macaulay 1996, this book is intended to introduce an often misunderstood field to a new generation of students. Each of these books begins with a discussion of how to title the field (anthropological linguistics? linguistic anthropology?) and how to justify the material included and excluded. While acknowledging kinship with sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, ethnography of speaking or ethnolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, each book mentions studies belonging to these subfields but does not situate them at the center. The basic issue appears to be what these authors regard as fundamental questions; to fall within linguistic anthropology, the questions have to be anthropological. In other words, the aim is usually to uncover some aspect of a society through close examination of its language. Studies of language for its own sake might be interesting, important, even essential; but these tend not to be the focal issue in the works mentioned above.

This ambitious volume succeeds in pulling together diverse approaches to surveying and analyzing human culture through human linguistic ability, as viewed by linguists and anthropologists. It does not, by any measure, take an extreme Whorfian view – or, for that matter, an extreme anti-Whorfian view – of the relationship between language and culture; rather, it sets forth a series of ideas about the mediating role of cognition in the ways in which we view and talk about the world around us. This is not a surprising stance for the editors; Taylor has long been a proponent of the semantics-based theory of cognitive grammar (cf. Taylor 1995), and MacLaury has recently published a study (1997) of color terminology within an offshoot of cognitive grammar called vantage theory.

This collection of Ferguson's articles brings together his research over four decades. When Ferguson started writing about topics related to language and society, the term “sociolinguistics” was barely used and had no recognized status as a field of inquiry. Today, the term seems too diffuse for all the strands of specialization that range from the examination of micro-socio-phonetic detail to the consideration of broad-based macro-sociological and linguistic institutions. Perhaps better than those of any other individual scholar, Ferguson's research interests reflect the breadth of the field. His topics of study have ranged “from Arabic linguistics to applied linguistics, from child language acquisition to language planning, from language and religion to language universals, from Bengali syntax to American sports announcer talk” (p. 3). His impact on the field is undeniable; but because of his expansive interests in an age of increasingly (and sometimes myopic) specialization, few readers are familiar with the full range of sociolinguistic topics that bear this scholar's mark. In Huebner's selection of articles, Ferguson's overall contribution to the field is put in perspective, although the collection is hardly exhaustive of his impact. (See now also Huebner's 1999 obituary of Ferguson.)

Singh criticizes sociolinguistics, whether in its Labovian or its Gumperzian guise, for failing to take into account what he describes as linguisticality and sociality. Thus variationism fails to take into account the underlying phonological laws that not only are a part of all languages, but are also specific to certain languages; and interactionism fails to take power and inequality into account.

The book under review addresses the central concern of this journal: the nature of the relation between language and society. Hasan's conception of this relation is a wide-ranging one; it includes the relation between different social positionings and different styles of speaking, the ways that language contributes to the communication and maintenance of ideologies, and the relation between the language of a text and the structure of that text. In addition, one finds contributions to what some readers will consider “pure” linguistic theory. Hasan devotes one chapter to an argument for including lexis as a part of grammatical description, and a second to the necessity for having semantic networks in addition to having grammatical networks. Both “theoretical” issues form critical steps in Hasan's dream of describing the “continuity from the living of life on the one hand right down to the morpheme on the other.” It is worthy of note that her argument regarding semantic networks is presented within the framework of a theory of linguistics that tends to semanticize grammar; thus this is a more significant claim than it would have been if she had been using a formalist approach.

Hedging has become a topic of renewed interest recently among discourse-oriented linguists. Recent publications attesting to this fact include Salager-Meyer 1994, Hyland 1994, 1996, 1998, Crompton 1997, and Skelton 1997, not to mention work on modals (e.g. Stubbs 1996, chaps. 5 and 8), evidentials (e.g. Barton 1993), and “vague language” (Channell 1994). The present volume continues this trend, providing a wide-ranging and truly international set of perspectives on the phenomenon of hedging.

Crowley's research into eighteenth-, twentieth-, and especially nineteenth-century writings about the English language is rare in its almost philological coverage and depth. What makes it unique is that it is conducted within an intellectual framework that is solidly “marxist” (with a small m, as Crowley now spells it), though not entirely immune to other strains of Theory (with a capital T). Crowley's marxism falls within that British tradition whose last great exponent was the Cambridge critic Raymond Williams – who has also inspired much of Crowley's method and style, and from those work the main title is taken (“Language in history: That full field,” Williams 1983:189).

“Disorders of discourse” – practices that constitute “barriers to communication” – can be subjected to critique, and critique can lead to the suggestion of different practices. Such changes in discourse may contribute to changes in the “structures of organizations.” However, in the absence of such structural changes, changes in discourse may actually result in more subtle, and thus more effective, forms of domination. That is the central problem raised in this book. Interaction between doctors and patients, teachers and pupils, politicians and publics, etc., can change in ways that eliminate the more obvious forms of interactional asymmetry, domination, or manipulation; yet whether such changes contribute to substantive democratization – or only give an appearance of democracy, which can make relations of domination more effective because less obvious – depends on how such new forms of interaction fit within the overall network of practices that constitutes the institution concerned.

The group known as the IGLSVL, which has produced this book, grew out of a link between the Department of Language and Linguistic Science of the University of York, England, and the Institut de Psychologie of the Université Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France. The group has been meeting every other year since 1986 and disseminating workshop discussions in mimeographed form. It is our good fortune that they decided, at their 1992 meeting, to publish the results of their work for wider distribution. The resulting volume, here under review, does an outstanding job of presenting an international survey, particularly rich in insider's views, of the advantages of vernacular literacy, as well as the difficulties of achieving it.

In her editorial Introduction (1–7), Thomason notes that study of the results of intense language contact – as in pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages – has hitherto been heavily biased in favor of instances of pidgins/creoles in which the lexifier languages have been European. One aim of this volume is to redress the balance by considering contact languages that have not involved a European lexifier. More significantly, this brings to the fore social and/or structural properties that differ from those in the contact languages that have formed much of traditional lore. This volume brings together studies on the following 12 contact languages: Hiri Motu (Tom Dutton, 9–41), Pidgin Delaware (Ives Goddard, 43–98), Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin (George L. Huttar & Frank J. Velantie, 99–124), Arabic-based pidgins and creoles (Jonathan Owens, 125–72), Kitúba (Salikoko S. Mufwene, 173–208), Sango (Helma Pasch, 209–70), Swahili (Derek Nurse, 271–94), Michif (Peter Bakker & Robert A. Papen, 295–363), Media Lengua (Pieter Muysken, 365–426), Callahuaya (Pieter Muysken, 427–47), Mednyj Aleut (Sarah G. Thomason, 449–68), and Ma'a (Sarah G. Thomason, 469–87).

This bilingual volume (in English and Slovak) opens with the text of the January 27, 1995 “Declaration on the occasion of the celebratory announcement of the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia” – printed in Rusyn, in Cyrillic, facing the English translation. Since the occasion had as much political as linguistic significance, a little background is in order. The Carpatho-Rusyns are ethnic East Slavs whose area of settlement since medieval times has been criss-crossed by shifting political boundaries. Until World War I, they lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire; today Rusyn populations are found mainly in western Ukraine (600,000 to 800,000) and in Slovakia (100,000), with smaller groups in Poland, Hungary, and Romania (much as the ethnic and linguistic community of Kurds straddles the national borders of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey). There is also a small Rusyn enclave in the former Yugoslavia, whose dialect is formally recognized as an official minority language (Bačka Rusyn, or Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyn), and part of this population now finds itself in still another country: Croatia. The Rusyn subgroups, from the Bačka Rusyns to the Lemkos of Polish Galicia or the Huculs who straddle the Romanian border, have distinct dialects, as well as their own religious and literary text traditions. After World War I, most Rusyns found themselves citizens of the new republic of Czechoslovakia; but after World War II, a large part of their area was ceded to the USSR, becoming the Transcarpathian Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR.

Judgments regarding history do not figure prominently in the writing of many linguists whom I know. Such evaluations are rather the purview of world figures, their biographers and acolytes, and historians. But it is precisely a historical judgment that is the central concern of the present work by a distinguished linguist. King has a cause to plead in this book: He believes that Jawaharlal Nehru has not been treated well in the court of history with regard to his language policy, and he means to change this largely negative assessment. From the title of the book, one would have every right to expect that the book would, at the least, contain a narrative of the substance and evolution of Nehru's thinking concerning language policy for India; and the book does provide precisely such an account. In fact, King states (xii) that telling this narrative is his principal goal. But advocacy is never far from the surface. King forthrightly states that Nehru did a far better job of joining battle in India's language conflicts than he is customarily given credit for (xiii). Convincing the reader that Nehru has gotten a bad rap with regard to language policy is, I believe, the central aim of this book.

In 1964 a South Indian man doused himself with kerosene and set himself alight, shouting, “Long live Tamil! Down with Hindi!” This act of self-sacrifice (followed by several more) provides the starting point for this long-overdue history of the Tamil language movement. In seeking to explain this extreme devotion to Tamil, Ramaswamy quickly points out that the usual answer of “linguistic nationalism” is inadequate. “Nationalism” is a blunt instrument, honed in the study of modern Europe, and “passions of the tongue do not readily map onto passions of the nation” (5). As a corrective, Ramaswamy sets out to write a “different” history of this extraordinary, possibly unique language movement by introducing the concept of tamilparru ‘devotion to Tamil’.

The Languages volume has been perhaps the most eagerly awaited of the Smithsonian Institution's monumental revision and updating, over the past three decades, of the Handbook of North American Indians, the original of which was produced by the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in the early years of the twentieth century (Hodge 1907). Linguists and ethnologists alike will find illustrative data on a range of language-related topics, accompanied by contemporary interpretations. Volume editor Goddard is to be congratulated for the scope and detail of this effort to characterize the state of the Americanist linguistic art. The volume consists of an Introduction by Goddard (1–16), a series of what we may call “discursive” articles by several authors, and a set of “Grammatical sketches,” followed by a Bibliography and Index.

It used to be that first-year linguistics students would be exposed to data from a wide variety of languages – in the classic textbooks of Bloomfield 1933, Gleason 1961, or Hockett 1958, and in the workbooks of Gleason 1955 and of Merrifield et al. 1967. We may not have known exactly where Nupe or Sierra Popoluca were spoken, but we knew something of how they operated. We learned about agglutination in Turkish and Swahili; we worked the notorious Nahuatl phonology problem in which Gleason insisted there were no misprints. Non-majors who wanted to learn something of linguistics might be offered a course called “Languages of the world.” In the guise of a survey of exotic peoples, they might be introduced to some of what linguists have discovered about the differences and similarities among languages and to techniques useful in describing them that might also apply to cultures in general.