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Court trials are formalized disputes in which the parties are denied confrontation and have restrictions placed on their rights to tell the story. The rights of telling are part of discourse rights, and in the courtroom they are circumscribed by attorneys' objections to either the other attorneys' questions or the witnesses' answers. This can be seen in the record of conduct of a three-hour misdemeanor trial in which 32 objections were voiced. The record indicates that most witnesses are not prepared for the degree to which their discourse rights will be abrogated in a courtroom, and the orderliness of a witness' story can be disrupted, restricted, or halted by any of three managers of his story: his own attorney, the opposing attorney, or the Court. In this trial, the witness whose testimony was the longest and was disrupted the least was a newly graduated law student prepared for the manner in which her discourse rights were to be abrogated. If a trial is a conflict between two narratives, each vying for ratification as true, it is the business of each attorney to make his storytellers as believable as possible. Witnesses who know the rules of courtroom talk can say the same set of facts in a very different way and be much more persuasive in court. (MSE)

Two claims are made concerning the interrelationship of language acquisition and socialization processes: (1) the process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of a society; and (2) the process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent through language and through acquiring knowledge of its functions, social distribution, and interpretations in and across socially defined situations. These claims are supported with evidence derived from a comparison of the social development of children in three societies: Anglo-American white middle class, Kaluli (Papua New Guinea), and Samoan. Specific theoretical arguments and methodological procedures for an ethnological approach to language development are presented, focusing on developmental research with interests and roots in language development rather than anthropological studies of socialization. Five specific aspects of the ethnological model of language acquisition are addressed: (1) the cultural organization of intentionality in language use; (2) the integration of sociocultural knowledge and code knowledge; (3) the unevenness of language development and the priority contexts for language acquisition; (4) the relationship between child language and caregiver language, specifically the lack of match between them; and (5) the role of biology in language acquisition. (MSE)

African Wolof society is divided into a number of ranked status groups or castes, the largest of which is the high-ranking noble caste. Wolof conceive of two styles of speaking, the restrained or noble-like and the elaborated or "griot"-like, and the two styles are connected by the presence or absence of "kerse," honor and self-control. The linguistic phenomena relevant to social rank are found in all aspects of speech performance: paralinguistic phenomena (such as intonation), phonology, syntax, and lexicon. Intonational features provide the most striking differences in style. Phonological differences seem to be related to differences in speech tempo. The griot style uses syntactic devices that lengthen the total utterance but add little or nothing to its meaning, while the noble style uses shorter, blander forms and intentional errors as a sign of high rank. The variants can also signal high and low rank within a caste. The use of intentional error can create confusion between a high-ranking individual and a linguistically incompetent foreigner. The linguistic system as a whole may have shifted in the direction of the high-status variant, and the reduction in surface elaboration is consistent with high-rank restraint and nonfluency, possibly arising from the general population's desire to appear more high-ranking. Thus the cultural valuation of speech can influence both the form and the direction of language change. (MSE)

Two speech styles, origin-myth telling and ritual wailing, found among the Shokleng Indians of south Brazil are analyzed from the perspective of two specific functions of speech style: (1) for indexing or highlighting the subject matter in certain contexts, and (2) for relating the contexts and subject matters to other contexts and subject matters based the iconicity of its signals (pronunciation differences, distinct intonational patterns, etc.) with other linguistic and nonlinguistic signals employed in the culture. It is argued that there are certain formal-functional regularities in the relation between the special speech style and the everyday code, characterized as expressive restriction and formal amplification, and that the Shokleng speech styles use pragmatic (nonsemantic) features, taking the marked value of some pragmatic variable in everyday code and fixing it in the speech style. Formal amplification, an alternative form of marking, is found in the alternating use of semantically equivalent forms. The indexing function of the speech styles, which is stated as a hypothesis about the Shokleng styles, is seen to have a more general relevance in that speech styles tend to occur in connection with contexts or subject matters that are areas of cultural emphasis. The second speech style function considered, the iconic function, works both to lead to meanings in various directions and to pull together or bring into focus those diverse regions of the system to which it leads. (MSE)

An examination of the play situations in which children are successful in learning second languages was undertaken based on observations that children in foreign language settings learn languages quickly in the process of daily play activities. A wide variety of activities were examined, including play phone conversations, soccer, elastic rope jumping, card and board games, role playing, and object-based fantasy. Structural elements examined include play with minimal language, contextualized formulae, turn exchanges, gestural support, imitation, explicit instruction, role assignment, and arguments. It was found that: (1) in different types of games children appear to routinely use their activity knowledge as if there were no language barrier; (2) language use differs considerably in various activities; (3) factors seeming to facilitate learning were redundancy with action that made words meaningful, availability of simple models to copy, and cooperative attitudes by the partner that led to instruction or willingness to interpret the learner's tries; (4) the foundation for children's language learning through play is their prior knowledge of the activity structure of the general game type, or in complex games, the specific game; and (5) the language learned in games varies in complexity, with the easiest to learn consisting of syntactically simple, highly repetitive formulae, and with the social success and sense of participation through the language acting as other benefits. (Author/MSE)

The communication of "person" has been a particularly elusive area of Japanese discourse. The elusive status of the person term (as distinguished from the Indo-European personal pronoun) raises the question of whether such terms, along with titles, kin terms, proper names, age-status terms, and zero forms, may all be part of a single system for differentiating self and other. Approaching the definition of person in the context of discourse eliminates some of the complexity of defining the entire system of terms, by shifting the emphasis from terms for person to communication of person. The continuum of person in Japanese is deictic, and the deictic zero point of Japanese discourse is the speaker's primary group rather than the individual speaker. The question of variability of self by which the Japanese have been defined is more a matter of focus than real difference in self/other relationships. In Japanese the focus is on the continuum itself while in English it is on the poles. An organization of discourse that seems enormously contradictory can be resolved by a multiple perspective that includes the relationships between discourse utterances, the social participants producing them, and the relationships they are negotiating in discourse. The point along the continuum between speaker and addressee that an utterance defines is generated only by participants in a particular discourse. This opens further questions as to whether Japanese social life is organized deictically and can be analyzed from a similar perspective. (MSE)

Kindergarten-aged children's use of parallel constructions in their peer storytelling, while not common, reflect children's interest in the organizational principle of theme and variation. Semantic and syntactic parallelism represent two of many ways in which some youngsters employ theme and variation in their storytelling. The constructions give a sense of cohesiveness to narrative efforts and provide a mechanism for organizing descriptions of the fictive world. Semantic parallelism, the more common form, emphasizes cataloging skills. In these constructions the children hold constant the stated and then implied syntactic frame as well as the central idea of the meaning set, and variation develops as they consider the range of phenomena that can be appropriately described within that central idea. This cataloging gives narrators a resource for fleshing out their stories, augmenting the storyteller role. Audience members can capitalize on the central idea of a meaning set in attempting to co-narrate and to comment. In responding to audience contributions, narrators deal with the issues of speaking rights and the boundaries of the narrative itself. (Author/MSE)

Yupik language has two devices to indicate switch reference. The rules generally given for them are not entirely correct, and counterexamples to the ideal have been found previously. A subset of those counterexamples in Central Yupik Eskimo support the claim that there are two systems, partially overlapping and partially unique, that organize discourse. One of these is a system of inflectional categories and the surface syntactic analysis it presents, and the other is a system of rhetorical structure, the structural analysis of the surface utterance that is evident from intonation, external sandhi, and sentence adverbial particle choice and placement. Neither system's syntactic analysis can be fully predicted from the other's. The switch reference that is entirely determined by the inflectional system is considered to be the ideal switch reference by both speakers and grammarians. However, research must proceed at both the clause/sentence level and the discourse level. (MSE)

The emergence of a subfield of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, whose goal is to discover the principles by which a hearer or reader understands a text or can construct a model based on the text, given the sentence-level competence to parse the text's sentences and assign logical forms to them, is discussed in the context of a court case in which a man sued a company for rescinding an insurance policy because it claimed he had answered several application questions falsely. The theories of linguistic pragmatics were used to analyze the application questions in an effort to determine whether or not the applicant, as a cooperative reader, could answer the questions in good faith without giving the information the application sought. The analysis of the four application questions is outlined in some detail, and problems facing the linguist serving as an expert witness in such a situation are examined. These include the fact that the domain of linguists, language, is explicitly taken to be the domain of the court; the appropriateness of the testimony, varying according to who hears it (whether lawyers alone or with a jury present); and lexical and conceptual differences between lawyers and linguists, as in the use of key terms such as "meaning" and "ambiguous." (MSE)

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the process of producing a cohesive discourse, and eventually to resolution of more general and abstract questions. The discussion is based on 255 paraphrase sequences, discourses in which a speaker paraphrases an already presented proposition after some other discourse material. It is suggested that paraphrases have four functions (intensification, subordination, transition marking, and conversational indexing), and the functions concern very different levels of discourse organization. It is also proposed that a single paraphrase may be used in more than one way, and that the functions cannot always be defined as mutually exclusive, suggesting that the customary practice of separating different sources of cohesion in discourse may not reflect speakers' own methods for producing and understanding orderly discourse, and hence that there is a need to focus more on the relationships between sources of cohesion. (MSE)

The nature of gazing at someone or something, as a form of communication among the Bahemba people in eastern Zaire, is analyzed across a range of situations. Variations of steady gazing, a common eye contact routine, are outlined, including: (1) negative non-gazing or glance routines, especially in situations in which gazing would ordinarily occur; (2) gazing for visual acquisition of knowledge, characterized in various lexical items indicating positive results of the gazing or knowledge acquisition by more than one sense; (3) long and unhurried scrutiny, with different terms to describe cautious looking, speculative looking, or participation in a process one is watching; (4) glancing and then blinking hard and looking away, serving as a warning to the speaker; (5) rapid blinking as an insult; (6) eye-rolling associated with witchcraft; (7) gazing with eyes half-closed and head tilted back as an immature gesture; (8) eye-contact avoidance as embarrassment or humility; (9) darting sideways glances as an indication of fear; and (10) intense gazing, sometimes with narrowed eyes or wide open eyes to show anger. Childhood error in understanding gazing routines, finer distinctions in gaze type, limits to gaze duration, less readily-elicited Hemba terms for non-negative short gazes and scans, and the interaction of other situational factors in distinguishing gazes are also discussed. (MSE)

While most previous research has implied or assumed that the conversational structure giving each speaker a turn to speak is universally normative, findings of one study suggest that in interactions with at least four participants, alternatives to this rule are possible. A phenomenon called "conversational fission" occurs when a four- (or more) person conversation departs from the one-person-one-turn format and two or more subconversations occur, allocating multiple speaker and multiple listener roles. This pattern is illustrated in a six-person conversation, both in speech and in body, head, and eye movements. At some point, two or more participants may self-select to speak simultaneously, and the situation is either repaired by one or more speakers becoming silent, or becomes two or more simultaneous conversations. This initial simultaneous talk may be an invitation to fission and may also involve a search by the simultaneous speakers for an available subgroup of listeners. The dyadic turn-taking model should be revised to account for turns taken simultaneously in non dyadic conversations, a multi systemic interaction pattern. This pattern also argues against the assumption of verbal hegemony in interaction with the related consideration that the right to speak is inherently limited rather than interactionally controlled and negotiated. (Author/MSE)

A folk theory of the effect of language on thought underlies decisions made in U.S. courts regarding language law. Previous work on folk theory has shown an internal structuring by which a premise entails subsequent terms, consistent within the framework of the folk theory's logic. An analysis of metapragmatic statements in U.S. case law materials reveals a crudely "Whorfian" premise from which a common folk theory of language builds. This theory, evident in judges' decisions and dissents, predicates the ability to understand U.S. political concepts on fluency in English. Because becoming a citizen requires comprehension of these political concepts, the folk theory links identity as a U.S. citizen with the ability to speak the English language. The appearance of a Whorfian premise in this folk theory also lends support to the suggestion by cognitive anthropologists that scientific theories are typically systematized adaptations of folk theories. (Author)

Because speaking was a major symbolic focus of 17th century Quakerism, a movement of radical puritanism, and distinctive ways of speaking represented the principal visible means by which the Quakers differentiated themselves from others, much of the religious and political conflict surrounding Quakerism implicated speaking in some way. One aspect of their speech that challenged the core of social relations and interaction was the Quaker refusal to use politeness phenomena: greetings, leavetakings, salutations, titles, and honorific pronouns. The Quakers actively criticized the practice of customary manners, feeling that such utterances were not literally true and that they represented earthly pride. It is not clear what address forms they actually did employ except that they did call both Quakers and non-Quakers "friend" and that the handshake became a customary gesture of leavetaking in some situations. The reason for the Quaker rejection of "you" in the second person singular is the subject of much speculation focusing primarily on two principles: grammaticality and the rejection of forms of deference. The "plain style" of speaking characterized by these elements was the subject of much public debate, the thrust of some of which was to try to decrease the validity of plain talk by trivializing it. The Quaker response was that if the plain style did not deserve so much attention, why did the non-Quakers oppose it so vehemently? The fact is that it did become a rallying symbol for both Quakers and non-Quakers during this peak period of the Quakers' missionary zeal. (MSE)

A study of the Kriol spoken in Australia's Fitzroy Valley begins with an overview of pidgins and creoles, and chronicles the historical beginnings of the Fitzroy Valley Kriol and the sociolinguistic situation there. Some grammatical features of Kriol are analyzed and compared to traditional Australian languages. Problems of assigning English etymons to Kriol words are discussed in terms of the contrast in meaning between Kriol lexemes and English words normally equated with them. This misapplication of vocabulary and meaning creates communication problems between Kriol and English speakers. (MSE)

Five studies of aboriginal language use in Australia's Northern Territory include: (1) "Yanyuwa--A Dying Language" (Jean F. Kirton), which outlines the factors contributing to the demise of the use of Yanyuwa since 1963 and the trend toward use of Kriol; (2) "Kriol in the Barkly Tableland" (Phillip L. Graber), presenting sociolinguistic and linguistic observations about the language use of aboriginal people in eight Kriol-speaking communities; (3) "Sociolinguistic Survey Report: Daly River Region Languages" (S. James Ellis), discussing sociological conditions of each Daly River area language; (4) "Sociolinguistic Survey Report: Wagalt Region Languages" (S. James Ellis), describing the population centers, sociological conditions of vernacular languages and the Belyuen Creole, and language attitudes in that area; and (5) "Tiwi: A Language Struggling to Survive" (Jenny Lee), chronicling Tiwi's history, Tiwi life today, the present language situation and the nature of change within it, and factors influencing the language's survival or revival. (MSE)

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the view that the language a person speaks influences his perception of the world. This hypothesis is frequently misunderstood to be a question of the influence of language on culture, when in reality it emphasizes the influence of language on the cognition of its speakers. This distinction between culture and cognition needs to be made clear, since the time dimension is different; the relationship between language and culture is diachronic, whereas that between language and cognition is synchronic. Lately, the hypothesis of linguistic relativity has lost influence because of the growth of interest in linguistic universals. Acceptance of one does not dictate rejection of the other, in that the two deal with language at different levels of abstraction. Experiments conducted to test the hypothesis of linguistic relativity have contributed to its loss of credibility, in that they have contained conceptual and methodological shortcomings. However, certain psychological concepts, such as selectivity and distortion in perception, offer sound support for the hypothesis. For future use, the hypothesis needs to be restricted in definition, emphasizing that language is only one of many factors influencing individual perception and cognition. (LG)

The relevance of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to language instruction is discussed. English as a second language has traditionally been ignored by English departments, and second language teaching in general has received little attention in language departments because of the emphasis on literary studies. ESL and EFL have emerged under the aegis of linguists interested in language acquisition, and have traditionally been directed at foreign students, while neglecting segments of the American population that are proficient in other languages or are in need of instruction in English as a second dialect. Psycholinguistics has contributed to alter this situation by attempting to understand the learning process. Sociolinguistic studies have contributed by: (1) examining what elements of culture and what cultural patterns are necessary to facilitate the communication process between different cultural groups, (2) defining the study and the awareness of the language teaching process, and (3) studying motivation and language attitudes. (CLK)

The established unit for reporting sociolinguistic data has been the sociologically determined group. Characteristically, only the mean rate of nonstandard usage for the group is reported for any linguistic feature. Such reporting obscures the possibility of linguistic heterogeneity within the group. Data from Los Angeles school children show that school classrooms are heterogeneous with respect to different forms of agreement usage. An alternative analysis is proposed in which children are grouped on the basis of linguistic criteria. Members of these groups share a common grammar. There is an implicational relationship among the grammars employed by such linguistically determined groups. The linguistically determined groups do not map exactly onto traditional sociologically determined groups. This relation may be expressed as the probability that a member of a sociologically determined group is a member of some linguistically determined group. This interpersonal variation may be distinguished from intrapersonal variation, or the probability that a rule of a particular grammar will apply. (Author)

Some bases of intra-group identification among Black people who inhabit urban ghettoes are discussed, as well as the economy of the ghetto, especially as it pertains to the strategies that Black Americans have evolved to deal with their subsistence problems. An attempt is made to relate these strategies to the presence of in-group schisms and to show how they serve to perpetuate intra-group divisiveness. It is suggested that participation in a common cultural heritage, particularly in the area of speech behavior, serves to reaffirm and dramatize solidarity in the face of divisive forces. Some features and usage conventions of Black English are briefly considered. The study is based on field research conducted in West Oakland, California, during 1966-67. (CLK)

The pragmatic use of nicknames as clarifiers separates the Maltese usage from those so common throughout the world where the nickname is used as a means of hiding identity. The familial character of most nicknames in Malta suggests they are the vestiges of a pre-Christian naming system. The major peculiarity in Malta is in the intermingling of seven naming devices in an evaluative system. The study of evaluative methods reveals a stable set of principles and fluid usage. People are mobile in the system according to their relative ability and the Maltese play with the system and express their personal feelings about others through it, regardless of the correctness of their opinions. In the case of musicians, nicknames are applied based on the musician's competence, and factions develop based on these evaluations and change over time. Personal evaluations used as insults evoke responses that have become institutionalized in the song duel, which creates various interpretations of the evaluation system. The purpose of the duelling is to create a set of situations in which speech is used indirectly in a way that allows for several possible interpretations, representative of some aspects of Maltese society. (MSE)

A discussion of the current status and future of Celtic languages in the United Kingdom looks at the social and linguistic history of the languages, problems facing the community of Celtic language users, specific tensions and relationships, implications for reform of social policy, and the role of formal language planning, legislation, and key agencies in the maintenance of the languages. First, general observations about Celtic language usage, distribution, and change are made. Key long-term demographic and social trends influencing Welsh, Gaelic, and Irish are examined, including the availability of education in the languages. The role of the advancement of educational technology in the loss of minority languages is also discussed. Efforts to date by the Welsh Language Educational Development Committee to support and enhance Welsh-medium education are viewed as a promising step toward a rudimentary national education plan for the Welsh-medium sector. An increasing role for identity formation and cultural reproduction is seen in the media and its technology. The current state of language-rights legislation is reviewed, and the position of each language in terms of the five stages of language survival is sketched. A 32-item bibliography is included. (MSE)

This report discusses and compares language planning and the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland and the English-speaking minority in Quebec. The report discusses four issues: historical minorities and the demographic dynamic; municipalities; the language of work; and other minority language groups. It is concluded that, despite numerous surface similarities, what clearly distinguishes Quebec from Finland is that, in Quebec, French has the characteristics of a minority language. French, unlike Finnish, does not establish itself as the language of work, and it has been necessary to pass a language law requiring children of new immigrants to go to French language schools. The competition exerted by English is very strong. What emerges most clearly from this comparison is the difference of the sociolinguistic dynamic of Quebec French and Finnish. French, the majority language, is sociologically a minority language in Quebec. (JL)

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than with giving an accurate rendering. Data from a linguistic paper, "Toward a New Perspective in Negro English Dialectology"(1965), by Beryl Loftman Bailey, are criticized. The paper uses Warren Miller's novel, "The Cool World," a novel written in literary dialect, as data in concluding that black and white Southern speech differs significantly because the speech of blacks has its origins in a "proto-creole" grammatical structure. Important aspects of a linquistic evaluation of literary dialect are discussed. Since Bailey's argument for black-white speech differences centers on verb usages, particularly the verb "be," the frequencies of "is/are" occurrence in "The Cool World" are compared with frequencies found in a study by Wolfram (1971) based on live informants. Four other items that are considered in criticizing the accuracy of the novel are multiple negativization, embedded yes-no questions, embedded Wh-questions, and optional "do support" (insertion of the verb "do" in a sentence). (SW)