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Starting from a recent flash of reflexive illumination experienced as a member of a dissertation committee, this act of (re-)constructive retrospection recalls the principal forces, experiences, and individuals that shaped my career as a linguistic anthropologist and turned my interests toward poetics, performance, language ideology, and remediation. Retracing my steps—sometimes halting, sometimes headlong—along the winding path that I have followed makes clear the degree to which my career has depended on the generous and energizing influence of my mentors, teachers, and colleagues, but also on the frustrating roadblocks placed in my way by less generous and understanding figures that led me to turn toward what proved to be far more productive directions. This reflexive process has also made clearer to me than ever before how strongly my career has been affected by the shifting conditions imposed by the political economy of higher education as I made my way in academe.

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.

In this review, I examine the recent turn to design in anthropology in three different configurations: anthropology of design, anthropology for design, and design for anthropology. Although these three configurations represent different cuts in a complex set of relations between these two disciplines, I have chosen to discuss them together because they all represent—though not always obviously so—attempts to contend with the moral implications of humans intervening in the lives of other humans. One goal of this article is to specify and evaluate a long-standing but underarticulated regard for design and designed things in anthropology while also offering a framework for critically engaging anthropology's relationship with design in its multiple configurations.

How are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, and two, it has limited the scope of inquiry to Whorf's narrow interpretations of the key terms “language,” “thought,” and “reality.” This article first reviews some of the ideas and results of Neo-Whorfian work, concentrating on the special role of linguistic categorization in heuristic decision making. It then considers new and potential directions in work on linguistic relativity, taken broadly to mean the ways in which the perspective offered by a given language can affect thought (or mind) and reality. New lines of work must reconsider the idea of linguistic relativity by exploring the range of available interpretations of the key terms: in particular, “language” beyond reference, “thought” beyond nonsocial processing, and “reality” beyond brute, nonsocial facts.

This review considers research on language and affect, with particular attention to gender, that has appeared in the past two decades in ways informed by the recent effloresence of work on affect in feminist, queer, (post)colonial, and critical race studies. The review is selective: It focuses on a few key ways that recent research is responding to gaps identified in earlier research and opening up promising areas for future research. This review thus attempts to connect linguistic anthropological and discourse analytic studies more fully with contemporary debates in feminist, queer, antiracist, and postcolonial studies. In general, I look at the rise of more fully historical approaches; in particular, I look at (a) affect in imperial and other global encounters; (b) language, neoliberalism, and affective labor; and (c) terror and hate, compassion, and conviviality in public speech. It also considers why we are, at this particular moment, witnessing such interest in affect.

Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists—including the production of differentially valued identities, the circulation and transformation of cultural models, and nation states’ establishment of official peoples—linguistic anthropological research on education also contributes to cultural and linguistic anthropology more generally. This article defines linguistic anthropology through its focus on language form, use, ideology, and domain, and it reviews linguistic anthropological research that focuses on these four aspects of educational language use.

In responding to the globally accelerating rate at which linguistic varieties are disappearing, structural linguistics is confronted with a number of challenges for which it is ill-equipped because of limitations in its basic conceptualization of linguistic knowledge. In addition to providing a brief history of the recent promotion of language endangerment to a major concern of the discipline as a whole, this article discusses three such challenges: (a) new demands on linguistic fieldwork practices, (b) rhetorical tensions arising from the need to address a multiplicity of audiences; (c) the limits of the traditional descriptive trilogy and its replacement by the concept of language documentation. On a theoretical level, these challenges are all linked to the problem that the structuralist conception of linguistic structures lacks adequate grounding in the social realities of the speech community, a problem that has accompanied linguistic structuralism since its inception.

Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and communities. These studies allow for a new comparative perspective, which attends to the consequences of linguistic and social differences for the organization of social interaction. A framework for such a comparative analysis focusing on a series of generic interactional issues or “problems” (e.g., how turns are to be distributed among participants) and the way they are solved through the mobilization of local resources (grammar, social categories, etc.) is sketched. Comparative studies in conversation analysis encourage us to think of interaction in terms of generic organizations of interaction, which are inflected or torqued by the local circumstances within which they operate ( Schegloff 2006 ).

The interests of anthropologists, focused on using the “meaning” of words and expressions as an entrée into understanding cultures, and of linguists, focused on the grammatically relevant sense components of abstract lexical forms, can be differentiated. A multicomponential lexicography is outlined for investigating various oinoglossic (“wine-talk”) registers of language, adequate to exploring this sociologically complex field of discourse spanning wine production, marketing, consumption, and connoisseurship. This approach builds on developments of the past 30 years in linguistic anthropology and related areas that have clarified the relations of structural sense, stereotypy (cultural concepts), and indexicality in language, and how and where to investigate these very different semiotic partials of language use.

Much of the burgeoning literature on food in anthropology and related fields implicitly engages with issues of memory. Although only a relatively small but growing number of food-centered studies frame themselves as directly concerned with memory—for instance, in regard to embodied forms of memory—many more engage with its varying forms and manifestations, such as in a diverse range of studies in which food becomes a significant site implicated in social change, the now-voluminous body relating food to ethnic or other forms of identity, and invented food traditions in nationalism and consumer capitalism. Such studies are of interest not only because of what they may tell us about food, but moreover because particular facets of food and food-centered memory offer more general insights into the phenomenon of memory and approaches to its study in anthropology and related fields.

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money's social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money's distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reification. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the "great transformation" from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money's fictions continue to surprise. Copyright © 2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved.

Over the past decade, the field of biocultural diversity has arisen as an area of transdisciplinary research concerned with investigating the links between the world's linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity as manifestations of the diversity of life. The impetus for the emergence of this field came from the observation that all three diversities are under threat by some of the same forces and from the perception that loss of diversity at all levels spells dramatic consequences for humanity and the earth. Accordingly, the field of biocultural diversity has developed with both a theoretical and a practical side, the latter focusing on on-the-ground work and policy, as well as with an ethics and human rights component. This review provides some background on the historical antecedents and beginnings of this field and on its philosophical and ethical underpinnings, and then surveys the key literature on biocultural diversity, concentrating on three main aspects: global and regional studies on the links between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity; the measurement and assessment of biocultural diversity; and the protection and maintenance of biocultural diversity. The review concludes with some considerations about future prospects for this emerging field.

This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.

Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional essentialist vision of languages as entities with offspring that diverge, with shared innovations marking divergent branches and internal processes of evolution accounting for diversity among modern languages. Recent theoretical and empirical research on linguistic diversity, language change, and social diffusion of innovation argues for a unit-based approach to language change and relatedness, where the units of analysis are individual speakers and individual linguistic items. This review begins with discussion of the language situation in Mainland Southeast Asia, where the language “genealogies” have been dramatically permeated by socio-historical contact, then explores theoretical and methodological implications for research on language both generally and in its areal context.

▪ Abstract Recently, language activists and linguists have begun using new technologies in projects aimed at revitalizing the practice of lesser-used languages. This review explores related work, emphasizing how practices of electronic mediation enabled by such technologies both shape and are informed by linguistic ideologies, which in turn crucially influence the possible revived use or abandonment of linguistic varieties. New technologies are treated as part of cultures of electronic mediation, connecting sociocultural valuations to mediated discourse. Their use often has important political implications, given that projects of language revitalization are often linked to claims of ethnolinguistic recognition. Finally, because documentation of lesser-used languages using digital technologies also results in the production of new cultural objects to be stored, displayed, and circulated, attention is also focused on the forms of sociality sustained by the creation and exchange of such electronic artifacts.

▪ Abstract Research to date on the relationship between new communications technologies and language emphasizes linguistic and social differences between online and off-line interactions and the impact of global English on the non-English-speaking world. These studies conclude, for the most part, that computer-mediated communication reproduces the social, political, and economic relations that exist in the real world. Related areas of research, including ethnographies of global hip hop and studies of urban hybrid language varieties, offer important models for using anthropological approaches to advance our understanding of the interconnections and situated-ness, of language, new technologies, global media, and social change.

▪ Abstract In this brief, autobiographical account, I trace the development of my intellectual and theoretical interests, especially as they relate to culture. How can we account for culture's being learned by individuals and yet apparently shared by members of a community? How do cultures as shared within communities change and evolve? How does what we know about languages, themselves a kind of cultural tradition, contribute to understanding culture and cultural evolution? Are processes of cultural and linguistic evolution analogous to those in the evolution of biological species and, if so, in what ways? How, also, do genetically based behavioral proclivities manifest themselves in social arenas that are structured by language and culture?

▪ Abstract Using Australian languages as examples, cultural selection is shown to shape linguistic structure through invisible hand processes that pattern the unintended outcomes (structures in the system of shared linguistic norms) of intentional actions (particular utterances by individual agents).Examples of the emergence of culturally patterned structure through use are drawn from various levels: the semantics of the lexicon, grammaticalized kin-related categories, and culture-specific organizations of sociolinguistic diversity, such as moiety lects, “mother-in-law” registers, and triangular kin terms. These phenomena result from a complex of diachronic processes that adapt linguistic structures to culture-specific concepts and practices, such as ritualization and phonetic reduction of frequently used sequences, the input of shared cultural knowledge into pragmatic interpretation, semanticization of originally context-dependent inferences, and the input of linguistic ideologies into the systematization of lectal variants. Some of these processes, such as the emergence of subsection terminology and moiety lects, operate over speech communities that transcend any single language and can only be explained if the relevant processes take the multilingual speech community as their domain of operation.Taken together, the cases considered here provide strong evidence against nativist assumptions that see linguistic structures simply as instantiations of biologically given “mentalese” concepts already present in the mind of every child and give evidence in favor of a view that sees individual language structures as also conditioned by historical processes, of which functional adaptation of various kinds is most important. They also illustrate how, in the domain of language, stable socially shared structures can emerge from the summed effects of many communicative micro-events by individual agents.

▪ Abstract In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland South American discourse.

▪ Abstract While continuing to uphold the major aims set out in the first generation of language socialization studies, recent research examines the particularities of language socialization processes as they unfold in institutional contexts and in a wide variety of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings characterized by bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, language shift, syncretism, and other phenomena associated with contact between languages and cultures. Meanwhile new areas of analytic focus such as morality, narrative, and ideologies of language have proven highly productive. In the two decades since its earliest formulation, the language socialization paradigm has proven coherent and flexible enough not merely to endure, but to adapt, to rise to these new theoretical and methodological challenges, and to grow. The sources and directions of that growth are the focus of this review.

▪ Abstract This review describes a paradigmatic shift in anthropological studies of human movement, from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of body movement as dynamically embodied action. After outlining the scope of such study, historical and cultural reasons for the relative neglect of body movement in anthropological enquiry are examined critically and placed in the wider context of recent social and cultural theorizing about the body and the problem of dynamic embodiment. A historical overview situates earlier approaches, such as kinesics and proxemics, in relation to more recent developments in theory and method, such as those offered by semasiology and the concept of the “action sign.” Overlapping interests with linguistic and cognitive anthropology are described. The emergence of a holistic “anthropology of human movement” has raised new research questions that require new resources. Theoretical insights have challenged researchers to devise new methods and to adopt or devise new technologies, such as videotape and an adequate transcription system. An example of the latter illustrates the analytic advantages of literacy in the medium.

▪ Abstract Issues in the linguistic study of US Latinos are reviewed, with an emphasis on recent work in sociolinguistics. Predominant models of language contact are evaluated, as are factors contributing to variation. Among these factors are (a) the state of changes in progress; (b) the complexity of historical, socioeconomic, and demographic conditions of US Latinos; (c) the community's degree of contact with other ethnic/linguistic groups; (d) language attitudes toward the matrix and embedded languages; (e) the local evaluation and patterns of use of particular variants; and (f) the possibility of autochthonous innovation within the dialect. Questions of US Latino participation in changes beyond those in their immediate communities are addressed. The need to connect linguistic variation with other aspects of semiotic meaning is emphasized.

▪ Abstract Optimality theory was introduced in the early 1990s as an alternative model of the organization of natural human language sound systems. This article provides an introduction to the model for the nonlinguist. The basic principles of optimality theory are introduced and explained (GEN, CON, and EVAL). Three important constraint families are explored (Faithfulness, Alignment, and Markedness). Illustrations are provided involving syllabification and vowel harmony in Tibetan and prosodic phonotactics in Tonkawa. The article closes with two general discussions. The first addresses recurring issues in phonological and linguistic analysis and sketches how optimality theory might account for these. The second points out how the explanations arrived at through optimality theory are providing new answers to familiar questions, as well as raising new questions for study.

▪ Abstract This paper provides an overview of the main approaches to the discursive analysis of racist utterances. Moreover, we discuss the notions of racism and race historically and from the point of view of different cultures and languages. We restrict ourselves to the discourse analytical concepts and methodologies, which vary greatly, both in theory and in analysis. We present one example and analyze it in detail as an illustration of the linguistic tools that help make hidden and latent meanings transparent.

▪ Abstract The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years, as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed, some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships, discard those that prove incorrect, and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic “distance” between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others.

▪ Abstract An emergent focus of linguistic anthropological research is discernible in the investigation of the causes and consequences of contact of local language communities with forces of the wider polities in which they have become incorporated. This focus can be sketched by surveying a number of its component conceptual approaches, such as anthropological linguistics, ethnography of communication, variationist sociolinguistics, and the sociology and politics of languages. Its consideration of language as a total cultural fact is outlined by reference to studies that differentially emphasize language structure, entextualization/contextualization of language, and language ideology.

▪ Abstract Grammaticalization—the transformation of lexical items and phrases into grammatical forms—has been the focus of considerable study. Two chief directions can be identified. The first involves etymology and the taxonomy of possible changes in language, in which semantic and cognitive accounts of words and categories of words are considered to explain the changes. The second involves the discourse contexts within which grammaticalization occurs. Some researchers have questioned the standard idea of a stable synchronic a priori grammar in which linguistic structure is distinct from discourse, and have sought to replace this with the idea of “emergent grammar” in which repetitions of various kinds in discourse lead to perpetual structuration.

▪ Abstract Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life.

Linguistic elements such as phonemes, lexemes, and syntactic or morphological rules cannot be taken for granted as the shape in which border-making elements come. From the actor’s viewpoint, border-making elements take on their social reality as “languages,” “accents,” “mixing,” or “words.” These terms emerge among the people to whom language identities matter, in relations shaped by the politics of ethnicity, race, and class within the nation and by the politics of ethnic nationalism.

Recent work in linguistic anthropology has generated new and exciting per­ spectives on the vital role of contextualization in language meaning and func­ tion. At the same time, scholarship on legal language has begun to develop a more social and constructionist vision of the way linguistic processes affect the workings of the law at many levels. This review places some of the scholarship on legal language within the context of current linguistic-anthro­ pological understandings of language use and contextualization, to develop a framework for further work on language and law. It also draws on work in legal scholarship that has illuminated the politics of legal discoursc, to dcmon­ strate how this kind of approach can enliven anthropological understandings of the social grounding of language.

In recent years, work in ethnomusicology has moved decisively toward a fully anthropological perspective. Rhetorically evolving from an anthropology of music (229) to a musical anthropology (297), from the study of music and or in culture, society, and history to the study of music as culture, society, and history (28, 34, 35,70,91, 116, 127,230,250,265,268,272,298,346,347), ethnomusicological perspectives are increasingly social, linking the structure and practice of musical performances and styles with music's deep embedded­ ness in local and trans local forms of social imagination, activity, and experi­ ence. These shifts parallel similar movements in linguistic anthropology that emphasize the social, pragmatic, and emotional constitution of linguistic struc­ tures emerging in discourse, performance, textuality, and poetics. Although these latter shifts have been well chronicled recently (e.g. 17, 18,25,47,99, 109, 119,217,218,354), it has been twenty years since the last review of developments in ethnomusicology and musical anthropology appeared in this journal (227). In that review, McLeod predicted that the relationship between musical and linguistic approaches to culture would be crucial to a future of more rigorously contextualized ethnographic descriptions of musical behavior. The descriptive and analytic issues she raised, however, have developed both beyond and

How do gender and language interact? For the past 20 years or so, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and feminist thinkers have explored many aspects of this question. There are now dozens of books and hundreds of course offerings on gender and language (14, 20, 41, 60, 67, 92, 98, 99), specialized articles are found in many journals and collections (15, 21, 59, 78, 87, 90, 109, 110, 115), and review articles continue to appear (8, 32, 47, 74, 76, 89). Topics treated include sexist, heterosexist, and racist language; interruptions; graffiti and street remarks; names and forms of address; politeness; tag questions; directives; motherese; children's talk during play; schoolroom discourse; bilingualism and language contact; metaphors; shifts in word meanings; the language of science, religion, and war; silence and volubility; intonation; emotional expressiveness; religious and political rhetoric; sociolinguistic variation; and language change. This list is far from comprehensive but its scatter suggests an absence of theoretical coherence in language and gender studies. Partial integration of the range of linguistic phenomena that seem sensitive to gender is sometimes attempted by trying to explain them all in terms of a

In the conclusion of the article he wrote on "Pidgin and Creole Languages" for the 1976 issue of Annual Review of Anthropology, Derek Bickerton (20) claimed that despite the achievements of the previous ten years "the field still has a long way to go." Fifteen years later, pidgin and creole studies have come a long way. They have been transformed into one of the most dynamic and theoretically challenging fields of contemporary linguistics. During the past 15 years, Bickerton himself has done much to project pidgin and creole studies to the forefront of academic debate. His controversial but thoughtprovoking Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (22, 23) has generated vibrant discussions among scholars in a range of fields interested in the human language faculty. Can the study of creoles reveal the role played by the universal faculties of language in language formation and interlingual communication? Bickerton's challenge has catalyzed theoretical interest and brought focus and direction to a field of studies that had become extremely dispersed. As if to answer Bickerton's call, a number of important general books on pidgin and creole linguistics have appeared recently: Holm's (89, 90) ambitious and highly successful survey, balancing the role of universals and substrates in the formation of Atlantic creoles; Muhlhausler's (133) carefully crafted generalizations on pidgin and creole linguistics, from the standpoint of a universalist theory; Romaine's (155) meticulous introductory manual pro

A conspicuous trend of the last decade or so in linguistics has been a resurgence of interest in the delimitation of the common features of human language and in discovering the underlying principles that may account for them. Particularly in American linguistics, this marks a fundamental shift of emphasis from a more relativistic view which tended to stress the differences among languages and the configurational uniqueness of each individual language. Thus a remark of J oos in a reader intended to be broadly representative of American structuralism to the effect that "languages can differ without limit and in unpredictable ways," is frequently cited in the recent literature and always with a negative evaluation (34, p. 96). The term commonly employed for the study of the common basis of all human language is "language universals. " It was first employed by the Aginskys in a pioneering paper on this topic, published in 1948 (1)', a paper in which direct reference is made to Clark Wissler's familiar universal culture pattern (53). In their contribution, the Aginskys note that not only are the broad rubrics of culture universal but, as indicated by the Yale cross-cultural approach, many specific details of culture are universal also. In particular, in "language, one finds general traits and specific details that recur everywhere." They further remark that' 'the study will illuminate the problem of the psychic unity of man." The term itself thus derives from anthropological usage. In recent years, however, two quite distinct approaches have arisen. In comparing them, Bell (6) states that "the differences between the two approaches sometimes appear to be so great that it is hard to believe that they have the same goal. " For some time, however, there have been indications that some'Df the differences have been bridged, as noted for example in Lehmann's 1972 article entitled "Converging Theories in Linguistics" (37). One of these two approaches stems essentially from the anthropological tradition and in particular from the revival of typological interests in the 1950s. Another historical root is the collaboration between linguists and psychologists

Theories of grammar, grammatical analyses, and grammatical statements may be divided into three types: structural, formal, and functional. Structural grammar describes such grammatical structures as phonemes, morphemes, syntactic relations, semantics, interclause relations, constituents, dependencies, sentences, and occasionally, as with tagmemics and glossematics, texts and discourses. Formal grammar analyzes the same range of phenomena, but does so by constructing a formal model of language. The model itself is the object of description, and the language phenomena only the means of description, the material on which arguments are based. Thus formal and structural grammar share a great deal, and in fact formal grammar is a recent outgrowth of the structural tradition represented by, for example, Bloomfield. Functional grammar broadens its purview beyond these structural phenomena, and hence its theoretical outlook is distinctive. It analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approach is not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation. It should be emphasized that althoughfunction andfunctional have partly similar senses in linguistics and anthropology, functionalism in linguistics is quite different from functionalism in anthropology. Linguistic functionalism combines certain theoretical advances of formal grammar with the concerns

In principle, the study of language contact can be defined open-endedly, dealing with the gamut of linguistic and sociolinguistic components, and ranging from microscopic analysis of recorded speech fragments to the fate of nations. In the present review we are concerned more narrowly with the kinds of language change traditionally dealt with by historical linguists, such as changes in basic grammatical structure of speech varieties associated with reasonably stable social groups (rather than, say, immigrant second-language acquisition or the breakdown of grammar in the last speaker of a language). We cover the following topics: (a) structural convergence, code-switching, and borrowing; (b) attested adaptation patterns and teleological interpretations thereof; (c) variability in attested forms of borrowings; (d) productive adaptation routines; (e) role of early borrowings in ongoing routines; (f) hybrids and "false" adaptation routines; (g) limits of borrowing and relationship to pidgins/ creoles; (h) speech play; and (i) self-conscious or officially sponsored borrowing or elimination of borrowings.

This paper reviews recent literature on the linguistic expression of social status, particularly those studies relating forms of language use (social dialectology and style of speaking) to forms of social stratification. To place that literature in cross-cultural perspective, the principal question orienting the review is this: to what extent do the findings of sociolinguistic research on this topic in North America-notably the urban dialectology that has flourished in the past two decades-resemble or contrast with results for the rest of the world, especially the non-Western world? In other words, have studies of sociolinguistic patterns in American cities identified processes that occur in any or all societies exhibiting distinctions of social status, or have they identified processes that pertain only to a society of a certain kind (urban, industrial, class-based, speaking an Indo-European language)? I first summarize the relevant American work, then outline some of the problems in comparing these studies with studies of other settings; then I review some of the major forms of the linguistic expression of social status that have been discussed for the non-Western world: social dialects, language levels, and systems of honorifics. While language levels and honorifics may seem to pertain more to language structure than to language use per se, the relation between structure and use is one of the problems this literature raises.

Speaking, listening, writing, and reading are integral aspects of what we seek to convey by such notions as culture, symbolism, identity, and community when we examine human daily life across its folk-taxonomic "savage" and "domesticated" manifestations (15). The creation, analysis, storage, and growth of knowledge presuppose cognitive and linguistic processes for their sociocultural production and understanding. Knowledge is both a topic and a resource for the construction and understanding of human life, providing us with a framework for tracing changes in what often are called "traditional" and "modern" forms of social structure. This chapter builds on several types of research, including an earlier paper by the author (7), and especially on the discussion by Goody (15) that writing, particularly alphabetic literacy, altered communication as a face-to-face activity, augmented our critical abilities and activities, and facilitated the accumulation of abstract knowledge. The reflexive or contemplative study of different textual materials, including those which were initially presented orally, made literacy a powerful resource for the reconstruction of history as well as giving us a better understanding of change and invariant conditions of knowledge accumulation and communication in preliterate and literate groups. In his discussion of Robin Horton's (22) work comparing the relationship between African traditional thought and Western science, Goody distinguishes (a) comparisons of the religious thought of simple societies and the scientific thought of complex groups, from (b) the study of thought found in the development of contemporary science and the technical thinking found in traditional societies. The present chapter parallels Goody's concern by looking at the interaction of common sense and applied scientific reasoning in a contemporary medical setting. I first present a review of some recent work on the study of literacy, thought, and meaning within a context of oral and written communication. This research

Malinowski contributed the concept of "language as a mode of action" to anthropology on the basis of his landmark study of Trobriand Island society and culture (77, 78). Appropriately, Oceania has become a focus for the comparative study of language use, an interest crossing the subdisciplinary boundaries of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, performance-based folklore, and sociolinguistics. Analysts in these areas share a concern with relating text to context that stems from Malinowski's emphasis on understanding utterances within their context of situation; they are also concerned with the pragmatic relationships between language use and social change (39, 96). Modern studies in the social uses of language date to the 1960s, with the rise of ethnoand sociolinguistics. An early interest in language style in Oceania was reflected in J. L. Fischer's 1971 comprehensive review of speech associated with respect situations, gender, oratory, etc in the Pacific islands (48). In sociolinguistics, the issue of language style soon became subsumed under two rapidly growing theoretical camps, correlational/ variationist sociolinguistics (70, 108, 110), and the ethnography of communication (58). Of these two camps, the former has concentrated on the study of dialects, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, and pidgin and creole languages. Here a major concern has been to clarify the relationship between language variation and social processes, including the nature of linguistic differences and their social functions, the extent and nature of bilingualism or multilingualism in given situations, and the role of language in social

The term "pragmatics" is in wide and fashionable use today in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and adjoining fields. Its applications range from the narrow scope of the study of the meaning of deictic expressions to use as a catch-all category covering all aspects of communication that cannot be analyzed as literal meaning, including even matters of turn-taking and social interaction. Morris (28) used "pragmatics" to describe those aspects of language which involve users, and contexts of use, of linguistic expressions. He opposed pragmatics to syntax (the study of linguistic form) and semantics (the study of the literal meaning of expressions). But Morris's discussion of pragmatics was programmatic and not very specific. Bar-Hillel (3) proposed more specifically that pragmatics be concerned with indexical expressions; that is, expressions whose meaning or reference cannot be determined without reference to context-the pronoun I and the adverbs here, now, and then, for example. Despite such discussions, the study of pragmatics in linguistics received little attention until strong interest in it was provoked in the early 1970s, when the interests of philosophers and linguists (especially, but not exclusively, those associated with "generative semantics") converged on the topics of presupposition and conversational implicature (these terms will be explained below).

We receive at least two kinds of education in life. The primary kind for most societies of the world is what the literary critic Northrup Frye calls "an education in concern" (48), the cultural transmission which enables us to learn ways of believing, behaving toward, and valuing people around us. This is an education in which we learn identity, attachments, assumptions, and implicit and explicit rules. Very little of it do we study, and though family, peers, and others familiar to us teach it, we have ultimate responsibility for learning it early, quickly, and thoroughly. Other types of learning experiences, usually taught by strangers in schools or other formal institutions, provide an education in what Frye terms "the truth of correspondence" (48). These transitional educational experiences prepare us to move from one life stage or situation to another. In modem industrialized societies, formal institutions provide this transitional education. They transmit, in contrast to that which we learn in our "education in concern," what Margaret Mead once described as the curriculum upon which no one is agreed. While the first kind of education reflects tl).e need for the young to learn what everyone is agreed they would wish to know, the second is based on the will of some individuals to teach something which it is not agreed that anyone has any desire to know (87). Schooling may bring with it a growing sense of dissonance between the knowledge transmitted by the familiar groups in which we first achieve our identity and the subsequent transitional educational experiences of lifelong learning. Every student must then search for the degree of correspond­ ence among the prior learning in home and community, the teachings of formal institutions, and the information and skills which the adult world of work and leisure will demand.

In one sense "linguistic theory" is whatever linguistic theorists choose to do. In the late 1940s, for example, they sought to characterize the relation­ ship between some corpus, whether fixed or potential, and an analytic state­ ment of structure. With the self-proclaimed revolution in the field during the past 15 or so years, linguistic theory in the dominant school has been defined as the construction of a universal theory of grammar in the sense of neces­ sary universals of linguistic "competence." This is from the point of view of what linguistic theorists are doing. Clearly all linguists at all times have as a general aim the elucidation of language in every respect; this is the ideal lin­ guistic theory. To a great extent, the issues of theory in syntax and semantics are the same as those in phonology and morphology. These include criteria of cate­ gory and rule types, rule applicability, naturalness of linguistic generaliza­ tions, diachrony versus synchrony. Inasmuch as the most intense recent con­ troversy has detailed areas of "syntax," broadly conceived, and "meaning," and because of severe space limitations on the current report, I limit my ex­ position to these concerns. In addition, this discussion of the more restricted area is based principally on the last two bibliographical years, with emphasis intended to be in proportion to the work reported. During this period linguis­ tic theory as defined by the transformational generative point of view contin­ ued to dominate the field as the most formalized, most developed, and most explicit framework.