Although oral histories about the Holocaust are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns relationships with significant and familiar “others.” By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships (with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position “others” within both their own lives and more broadly construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent identities (victim, survivor, bystander).

This article investigates how participants in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct; and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect, second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.

This study examines the types of interactional trouble that arise from narrative variation in institutional interviews. Specifically, we examine protective order interviews in which Latina women tell of domestic violence to paralegal interviewers charged with the duty of helping them obtain a protective order. Victims' narratives are shown to take different shapes, and paralegals respond to them in different pragmalinguistic ways, depending on how they diverge from institutional needs. The factors found most heavily to influence narrative outcomes are contextual ones, related to participant social roles, the type of communicative activity interlocutors perceive themselves to be engaged in, and their interactional goals. An additional finding is that when expectations of what constitutes appropriate speech behavior differ, the interlocutor holding greater institutional power will try to constrain the speech of the other, despite the fact that both appear to share an extralinguistic goal, in this case obtaining a protective order.

This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative attitudes toward non-native speakers and poor comprehension of those speakers. Twelve native English speakers whose attitudes toward Koreans had been assessed were asked to complete an interactional map task paired with native Korean speakers. In the task, some but not all of those who had been assessed as having negative attitudes toward Koreans were found to use either strategies that were described as problematizing their partners' utterances, or strategies that were described as avoidance. All participants completed the map task reasonably successfully except where the native English speaker used avoidance strategies, suggesting that the relationship between attitude and comprehension is mediated by the native speaker's choice of strategies. However, there appeared to be a direct relationship between attitude and perceived success of interactions, which may ultimately have the same consequences for interactants as if the relationship were between attitude and actual success.

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

Most of us content ourselves with passing on our alphabetical literacy to others all the while extolling the virtues of both the alphabet and of literacy; but Roy Harris, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics of Oxford University, sets out to challenge our fundamental (mis)conceptions about writing. Rather than extol the virtues of the alphabet, he threatens to reveal the “tyranny of the alphabet.” Arguing about literacy, he says, is likely to be unproductive until writing itself is better understood.

The past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in the possible influences of language on “thought” – that is, relativism, the “Whorf Theory Complex” (cf. Lee 1996), or the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH). On the occasion of the Whorf centenary in 1997, a number of international conferences, workshops, and symposia were dedicated to the topic. This volume presents a collection of papers from the 26th International LAUD Symposium held at Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany, April 1–5, 1998, under the title “Humboldt and Whorf Revisited: Universal and Culture-Specific Conceptualizations in Grammar and Lexis.

This important book – hereafter DSE – demonstrates for all linguists how an insightful observation by a young scholar can question basic assumptions and fondly held beliefs. In 1996, Laura Wright published an essay in a Festschrift for Eric Stanley in which she pointed to the fragility of the received wisdom that the modern prestige dialect of Britain emerged from a medieval “Central Midland” progenitor brought to London from the north and promulgated through the scribes in the Court of Chancery. In 1997, a conference was held in Cambridge to pursue the questions she had raised; then, in 1999, further discussion at the University of London led to this volume.

Latin language and Latin culture is a short, concentrated treatise on the Latin language and its impact, past and present, on those who have come in contact with it. The author is not a linguist, nor is this book written in any way as a contribution to the linguistics or sociolinguistics of Latin. If it were being reviewed from the perspective of Classical philology and literary theory in which it is written, the assessment of it would be very different from the evaluation that follows; so in a sense, my review is biased a priori in that I can approach the issues it raises only from a perspective that is wholly different from that of the author. Nonetheless, a book about language and culture invites the attention of the linguist, and we would be derelict if we were to dismiss it as linguistically uninteresting. Indeed, it is both interesting and provocative.

This book proposes to examine how the development of the city is intrinsically connected with language interactions and social norms. How can one account for social behaviors in urban settings without explaining why such behaviors are specifically urban? The studies collected here aim at expounding how five cities – Rouen (France), Venice (Italy), Berlin (Germany), Athens (Greece), and Mons (Belgium) – are places of tension, conflict, and community sharing through the use of dialectal or sociolectal language varieties.

This book is the result of the project Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups in Spain, started in 1993. After the introductory chapter by the editor, the book is divided into four parts, which contain 16 articles on the sociolinguistic situation of a series of established and migrant communities in Spain, viewed from an interdisciplinary standpoint. There are numerous maps and graphics, but no index.

This book consists of seven chapters; its main aim is “to apply certain theoretical insights into linguistic variation and change to the Spanish speaking world” (p. ix). The first three chapters are devoted to explaining fundamental concepts related to variation and change; the following three, to presenting the broad patterns displayed by geographical and social variation in Spanish; and the last, to the history of the standardization process of Spanish. From the beginning, Penny makes clear that he is not claiming to advance variationist theory, but he hopes that the data presented in the book will test and support such theoretical approach to language, which I understand he refers to in the sense of the quantitative paradigm. Similar disclaimers are made throughout the book regarding the unequal attention paid to the correlation between linguistic and sociological features of Spanish-speaking communities, given the paucity of data available.

This fourth volume in the series “Language, Power and Social Process” is an excellent ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of youth culture in Barcelona. Joan Pujolar brings research on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism into the post-structuralist era without pretense or puffery. The book is a systematic exploration of bilingual practices in relation to the variable construction and performance of gender and class as well as ethnic identities. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin, Pujolar has an acute – and, as far as I know, unerring – sensitivity to the voices of the Catalan context.

Anita Puckett's Seldom ask, never tell is an important, long-needed work that enables us to conceptualize “Appalachian speech” not only in terms of dialect or traditional aesthetic resources, but also according to characteristic “ways of speaking” and the ideology of pragmatics that informs them. Building on Irvine's (1989) realization that “speech economy” is not merely a metaphor, Puckett has created a meticulous and insightful ethnography of the range of “requesting behaviors” that index and constitute the “socioeconomy” of a community in coalfield Appalachia.

In Hiroko Tanaka, “Adverbials for turn projection in Japanese: Toward a demystification of the ‘telepathic’ mode of communication” (Language in Society 30:559–87), p. 580, next to last line, omiyari should read omoiyari.