Ntam ‘reminiscential oath’ among the Akan of Ghana is a commissive form that has statutory force. In it, the oath-taker evokes the memory of historical events that are dangerous and unpleasant to mention. The statutory force of the oath is accomplished by the evocation of these memories in the community which shares them. This article reviews the types of ntam oaths, the contexts for their use, and their structure.

This study explores a phenomenon in Japanese conversation that might be regarded as “discourse-within-a-sentence,” or interpolating a sequence of talk during ongoing sentence construction. It explicates the way in which Japanese speakers use postpositional particles as a resource to incorporate an element in a parenthetical sequence into the syntax of a sentence-in-progress. It is shown that the usability of postpositions for achieving discourse-within-a-sentence comes from the situated workings of postpositions used in a wider range of interactional contexts. Through a detailed examination of relevant instances from transcribed Japanese conversations, this study addresses such issues as (i) “sentences” in interaction as both a resource for, and an outcome of, intricate interactional work; (ii) postpositions as resources for retroactive transformations of turn-shapes in Japanese; and (iii) the relationship between typological features of the grammar of a language and forms of interactional practices.I wish to thank the following people for valuable comments at various stages in the development of this article: William Bright, Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, Noriko Fujii, Charles Goodwin, Jane Hill, Junko Mori, Tsuyoshi Ono, Jerome Packard, Hiroko Tanaka, and Sandra Thompson. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace (Fletcher 1999). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “women's work.” Drawing on the large Wellington Language in the Workplace database, it explores a variety of ways in which such relational work is manifested in workplace discourse; the analysis focuses on specific instances of relational practice, illustrating how such support work is backgrounded and typically discounted in New Zealand workplaces. The implications of the analysis for the gender/power dynamic are explored. Discussed in particular is the hypothesis that manifestations of relational practice differ in distinct communities of practice, and the validity of the equation of relational practice with “feminized” discourse is questioned.This article is based on a plenary paper presented at IGALA2, the second International Gender and Language Conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2002. It has benefited from comments received there as well as from other colleagues. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editor for helpful suggestions for improving it. We express our appreciation to other members of the Language in the Workplace team who have been involved with the project's development, data collection, processing, and transcription, including Maria Stubbe (research fellow), Bernadette Vine (corpus manager), and a number of research assistants. We also thank those who allowed their workplace interactions to be recorded. This research is supported by a grant from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology. More information on the project can be viewed on our website, 〈www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lwp〉.

This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various types of activities requiring different structures of participation. The aim is to move from binary definitions of the floor, particularly the opposition between one-at-a-time and collaborative, and toward a conceptualization of the floor as a continuum between “tighter” and “looser” organizations of talk in the activity.

Coulmas's new book, Writing systems, is intended as a textbook for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses dealing with written languages and literacy from the standpoint of linguistics and anthropology. The book provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the linguistic analysis of writing, and it offers detailed illustrations of the world's major writing systems and their social consequences, ranging from the birth of graphic signs as mnemonics to social stratification resulting from issues of literacy in modern society. Geared particularly toward the interests of linguists, the book places strong emphasis on the multiple levels of the form-sound nexus and the structural complexities of various writing systems around the world. It is accompanied by a concise exposition of the history of writing and a review of current investigations into reading and writing in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Overall, Coulmas does a first-rate job of linking the origin, development, and spread of writing to the growing interest in the linguistically motivated analysis of writing and its relation to the mind and society. Although the chapters cut across several layers of writing analysis, the historical, educational, and ideological issues of literacy are given less attention than might be expected, owing to the author's focus on the linguistic aspects of writing. At the end of each chapter, exercises are provided for mastery of basic concepts and issues discussed.

The new handbook of language and social psychology is a collection of essays that aim to highlight the importance of linguistic factors in social psychology and to stress the role of social interaction in the study of language. It follows in the footsteps of The handbook of social psychology, published just over 10 years ago. The goal of the present volume, as stated by one of the editors (Robinson), is to promote interest in and understanding of the dual relationship between the study of language and social psychology. Robinson states that the new handbook, in contrast with the original handbook, puts more emphasis on the “five ints”: intentions and interpretations in interpersonal and intergroup interactions. The volume delivers on its promise of promoting interest and understanding. There are a number of stimulating chapters, of which some provide an overview of a research area, others a particular perspective on a problem or a synthesis of different strands of research, and still others speculations, questions, and directions for future research. The volume as a whole is invaluable as a reference book and for an overview of current research questions in language and social psychology.

Discourse in late modernity purports to demonstrate the significance of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), principally a European disciplinary formation, for constructionist social theory across disciplines and social settings, and to argue for the specific importance of CDA within a broader sociology of modernity. The book is principally a work of theory-building and exemplification, meant for a broad scholarly audience. Unfortunately, however, scholars outside the CDA community will be frustrated by the book's dense and sometimes confused use of undefined technical terms, as well as by the very thin analyses of the volume's few empirical examples of complex theoretical points. Terms such as “discourse,” “structure,” and “text” are used in diverse ways, but often without apparent concern for the conflicting traditions in which they are central concepts. The book also politicizes questions of social power in ways that may alienate many readers who do not share the authors' Eurocentric politics. Finally, the writing in this volume suffers from needlessly dense and complex prose syntax. These rhetorical problems are not as minor as they may sound, for they disguise – and, thereby, ironically reveal – more substantial flaws in the core arguments of the volume.

During the past 25 years, anthropologists, linguists, and other social scientists have taken a keen interest in delineating the nature (form and function) of play, not only among humans but also among other higher primates. The establishment of the Society for the Study of Play in the1970s, the annual meetings of its members, and the resulting publications clearly manifest this interest. Sherzer's book on speech play and verbal art is a significant addition to the extant literature on the subject. His aim is to delineate “the significance of verbal play in the intersection of language, culture, and society in relation to verbal art” (p. 1). He views speech play as an “implicit and explicit meta-commentary on everyday life and artistic performance” (1).

This is a study of dialogues performed in improvisational (“improv”) theater. Improv actors work without scripts, using mime and dialogue to come to a working agreement about cast of characters, setting, and plot, usually within a few interactional turns. Their performances are thus an ideal site for studying how framing works: how interactants come to a mutual understanding of what is going on that is shaped by and subsequently shapes their contributions. Although it does not quite meet its ambitious theoretical goals, the book is well worth reading, both for the descriptions and examples of a fascinating set of language games and for Sawyer's intriguing suggestions about what we can learn from them.

The analysis of classroom discourse dates back at least to Sinclair & Coulthard's (1975) often-cited study, which inspired researchers to examine patterns of student-teacher interaction. In particular, their description of a typical classroom interactional pattern, the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE), inspired further research that focused on issues of control and how interaction is structured. Cazden's (1988) volume influenced a further generation of researchers to ask questions about how patterns of language use reveal what counts as knowledge and learning.

As stated in the Introduction, this edited volume aims to achieve two overlapping goals: to celebrate the diverse set of research falling under the label “language and social interaction” (LSI), and to honor the work and teachings of Robert Hopper, who died in 1998. Toward the first goal, the book begins, following the Introduction, with 32 original essays divided into 4 parts: “Orienting to the field of language and social interaction,” “Talk in everyday life,” “Talk in institutional settings,” and “Emerging trajectories: Body, mind, and spirit.” The contributors are largely researchers well known for their work in the area of conversation analysis (CA), including Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, Paul Drew, John Heritage, Anita Pomerantz, Chuck Goodwin, and Gene Lerner, but the articles also cross disciplinary borders to incorporate research on cognitive processing, gesture, speech evaluations, sociolinguistic variables (e.g., gender), and ethnography. To meet the second goal, the volume not only brings together a mixture of Hopper's former students and colleagues, but it also ends with a fifth part, titled “Robert Hopper: Teacher and scholar,” which is devoted to more personal messages about Hopper and his work, including a final chapter with his acceptance speech for the National Communication Association mentorship award. This last section of the book brings the total number of chapters to 39 and the number of pages to more than 600 (including the Index).

Its title and back-panel blurb are somewhat misleading: Faiths in their pronouns reflects a field of scholarship completely removed from the evidentiary standards to which sociolinguistic researchers are accustomed. This review therefore approaches the work with two broad questions in mind. First, how is scholarship from sociolinguistics transformed and utilized by other fields of study? And second, what can social scientists glean from various projects of “humanism” that bring to the forefront linguistic phenomena such as pronouns?

In Representing rape, Ehrlich provides a detailed linguistic account of a sexual assault trial. The data for this study come from two sources: a university tribunal and a criminal trial in which complaints were brought against a single man, pseudonym Matt, on behalf of two women. While focusing in each chapter on particular linguistic details, Ehrlich traces their use across several contexts within the legal proceedings – direct testimony, cross-examination and the delivery of judgments. In doing so, the author shows how the details of language use feed into larger frameworks of meaning and legal practice.

Bilingualism is a mainstay of current sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, and it has successfully migrated from the narrow concerns of “applied linguistics” to the very core of theoretical linguistic debate and argumentation. Research on bilinguals at both the societal and individual levels is now contributing to a deeper understanding of the place of language in human interaction and cognition. By its very nature, the study of bilingualism requires that researchers become involved with speakers at the level of communication, often in field situations that require subtle sociological and psychological insights relating to language choice and language switching as speakers attempt to establish personal and group identity.

This book is a collection of 10 articles treating different aspects of francophone rap music and hip-hop culture. Despite the facts that the first French rap recordings date from 1984 and that France has since become a center of rap music second only to the United States, this is the first book devoted to the subject. André Prévos begins the volume with a history of French rap music from its origins through the 1990s. Here we are introduced to many of the names that appear in later chapters. The following chapters treat the regional specificity of Marseilles rap (Jean-Marie Jacono); rap audiences in Marseilles (Anthony Pecqueux); the politics of French rap (Paul Silverstein); rap as a social movement (Manuel Boucher); hip-hop as an aesthetic subculture (Anne-Marie Green); an ethnography of tagging (Alain Milon); hip-hop dance (Hugues Bazin); rap in Libreville, Gabon (Michelle Auzanneau); and rap in Québec (Roger Chamberland). All the chapters except those by Prévos, Silverstein, and Chamberland were translated from French.

In Sista, speak! Sonja Lanehart presents the language and literacy autobiographies of three generations of African American women. These women tell the stories of their education and aspirations, focusing on how their literacy and language were influenced by social, economic, and political forces within school, family and community. Lanehart interprets the rich descriptions in their stories by examining the ideological perspectives of “experiences and cultures and ecologies” that shaped the women's views of themselves and their worlds” (p. 29).

Publications received.