This article examines data drawn from a 2001 Ontario (Canada) provincial inquiry into the deaths of seven people as a result of water contamination in a small Ontario town. The examination focuses on question-answer sequences in which the premier of Ontario, Michael Harris, attempted to resist lawyers' attempts to control and restrict his responses. In particular, on the basis of the data it is argued that the power of cross-examining lawyers does not reside solely in their ability to ask controlling and restrictive questions of witnesses, but rather is crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce straightforward, or “type-conforming,” answers to these controlling and restrictive questions. The witness whose testimony is analyzed was not compelled to produce answers that logically conformed to the form of the lawyers' questions (i.e., “yes” or “no”) and, as a result, often usurped control over the topical agenda of the proceedings. In this sense, the present work builds on Eades's conclusion that “we cannot rely on question form to discover how witnesses are controlled.”A previous version of this article was presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 15, Newcastle, U.K., in April 2004. We thank audience members at that conference and two reviewers for Language in Society for comments on previous versions. The research on which this article is based was funded in part by a SSHRCC Regular Research Grant (#410-2000-1330) to the first author.

This article investigates the utility of Eckert & McConnell-Ginet's concept of “community of practice” for an analysis of the language used by women in a sexual assault tribunal. It is shown how the questions asked by two tribunal members (a male and a female faculty member), in a university sexual “harassment” tribunal, function to (re)frame and (re)construct the events in question as consensual sex. Although the female complainants (i.e. victims) in the tribunal characterize their experiences as sexual assault, two of the tribunal members – one of whom is a female faculty member – ask questions that presuppose the inadequacy and deficiency of the complainants' signals of resistance, suggesting that their so-called lack of resistance was tantamount to consent. Clearly, any homogeneous notion of “woman's speech style” or “woman's point of view” would fail to account for the differences between the discursive patterns of this woman tribunal member and the women complainants in this context. However, if (as argued by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992a,b) our linguistic practices arise out of the kinds of community of practice with which we are involved, then an understanding of such local practices and activities should provide greater insight into the differential linguistic behavior of the women involved in this sexual “harassment” tribunal.

This paper reviews current research on language and gender and discusses the implications of such work for gender-based research in second language acquisition. Recent work in sociolinguistics, generally, and language and gender research, more specifically, has rejected categorical and fixed notions of social identities in favor of more constructivist and dynamic ones. Thus, in this paper I elaborate a conception of gender that has not generally informed research in the field of second language acquisition, and point to more recent work in the field that theorizes and investigates gender as a construct shaped by historical, cultural, social, and interactional factors.

In arguing for the necessity of gender-based language reform, feminist theorists have generally assumed that language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing reality. Rather, language is assumed to codify an androcentric worldview. While sexist language clearly reflects sexist social practices, the continuing existence of such practices throws into question the possibility of successful language reform. Because linguistic meanings are, to a large extent, socially constructed and constituted, terms initially introduced to be nonsexist and neutral may lose their neutrality in the mouths of a sexist speech community and/or culture. In this article we first examine the way in which nonsexist innovations have been appropriated by a sexist speech community. More specifically, we examine uses of neutral generics such as chairperson, spokesperson; singular they; he or she; and neutral titles such as Ms.; and we demonstrate that these terms are often not used nor interpreted in their intended (neutral) way. Rather, they are used in ways that maintain sexist stereotypes and distinctions. Then we examine the use of feminist linguistic innovations as they appear in the print media. We demonstrate the extent to which such terms get redefined and depoliticized by a speech community that is not predominantly feminist and is often sexist. (Language and gender, language and race, nonsexist language, gender-based language reform, neutral generics, discourse analysis)

This article examines the role of negotiations of meaning in providing comprehensible input for NNS learners. We report on an experiment conducted with NS–NNS and NS–NS pairs involving a picture-drawing task, where one member of each pair instructed the other in the drawing of simple objects. The results of the experiment suggest that the success or failure of meaning negotiations in providing comprehensible input depends on the point in the discourse at which they occur. We therefore question a prevailing assumption in the second language acquisition literature that the mere quantity of meaning negotiations within a discourse is an accurate predictor of the quantity of comprehensible input that results. We propose that meaning negotiations should be analyzed within a discourse framework to explain their role in creating comprehensible input.

Observations of Mars previously reported in 10 narrow bands between 3150 Å and 1.06 μ and in UBV are analyzed for brightness variations which correlate with longitude of the central meridian. Such an effect is found for λ ≥ 5000 Å, with some evidence for such a correlation at λ = 4570 Å. The data are then corrected to the mean (over longitude) brightness and a linear phase curve fitted to those observations with phase angle i ≥ 15°. An opposition effect (anomalous brightening at small phase angles) is found for wavelengths λ ≤ 5500 Å, in contrast to a result previously reported. The magnitude at zero phase, phase coefficient, and monochromatic albedo are computed for Mars as a function of wavelength.