This book is an introductory text intended for nonspecialists in sociolinguistics or linguistics.It is organized into four sections and designed so that its first section, the “Survey ofSociolinguistics,” may be read alone or along with the accompanying selected readings inthe second part. The third and fourth sections are references and a glossary. The readings sectionalso contains study questions that refer to both the survey and the readings, leading the reader tointegrate the information in both sections. The topics covered in the survey include the socialstudy of language, the ethnography of speaking and structure of conversation, locating variationsin speech, styles, gender, and social class, bilinguals and bilingualism, societal multilingualism,and applied sociolinguistics (which covers language policy and planning).

This paper investigates the nature of input available to learners in the institutional setting of the academic advising session. The advisory session, an unequal status encounter that by nature is a private speech event and cannot be observed by other learners, provides a starting point for the investigation of real and perceived availability of input. Evidence for the realization of speech acts as well as appropriate content and form, positive evidence from peers and status unequals, the effect of stereotypes, and limitations of a learner's pragmatic and grammatical competence are factors that may influence the course of development of interlanguage pragmatics in the institutional setting.

This thematic issue on the construction of discourse by nonnative speakers brings together papers from a variety of perspectives. The papers illustrate how our understanding of various aspects of learner language are enriched by viewing them when situated in text. Of the variety of analyses used in this issue, the most well-known to SLA researchers investigates the organization of the text itself and the learners' ability to structure such a text. Other investigations in this issue include the study of grammatical features of interlanguage that contribute to the structure of the text and, conversely, the study of textual features that determine the use of grammatical features: neither of which may be accessible through the analysis of sentence-level production. In addition to grammatical features, the study of lexical development can be enhanced through the study of text. Whereas lexical inventories alone do not reveal the true nature of the learners' lexicon, a study of text reveals not only which lexical items are selected by learners but also how they are employed in discourse. These studies of text extend to other areas of linguistic competence as well. In the study of pragmatic competence, viewing speech acts as they are situated in speech events (e.g., the speech act of recommendation in the speech event of a letter of recommendation) not only contributes to our understanding of how certain acts are realized in context, but also how they contribute to the structure of the discourse. Finally, in the construction of text, speakers and writers must take into account the addressee.

This paper investigates the occurrence of null objects in a stable nonnative variety of English spoken in Nepal. Previous studies of zero anaphora with second language learners have assumed that advanced learners of English will acquire the native target norms, which highly constrain null object occurrences. This paper shows that in the construction of text speakers of Nepali English may omit both direct and indirect objects in contexts where native speakers may not. Pragmatic principles govern these occurrences although they differ for the two types of objects. Null direct objects are part of discourse topic chains and their referents are recoverable within the text, even across speakers. Null indirect objects, on the other hand, refer primarily to discourse participants and do not generally need textual coreferents. The resultant discourse organization for this variety of English is one that requires greater addressee participation than native English discourse. The paper shows that when learners are confronted with input from two typologically distinct discourse traditions they may develop a third framework that utilizes compatible features for each.

This paper is a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Advanced adult nonnative speakers of English were taped in advising sessions over the course of a semester. Two speech acts, suggestions and rejections, were analyzed according to their frequency, form, and successfulness and compared with similar data gathered for native speakers. The nonnative speakers showed change toward the native speaker norms in their ability to employ appropriate speech acts, moving toward using more suggestions and fewer rejections, and became more successful negotiators. However, they changed less in their ability to employ appropriate forms of the speech acts, continuing to use fewer mitigators than the native speakers. Furthermore, unlike native speakers, they also used aggravators. We claim that these results may be explained by the availability of input: Learners receive positive and negative feedback from the advisor regarding the desirability and outcome of particular speech acts, but they do not receive such feedback regarding the appropriateness of the forms of such speech acts.