This paper examines how Yucatec Mayan people conceive of conversations. Special attention is given to the role of narrator, respondent, and audience in those speech arts which utilize conversational genres. The conversational genres of ordinary talk, storytelling, and myth-telling in Yucatec Mayan are all dialogues. One field-recorded narrative is analyzed in detail in order to illustrate the distribution and scope of narrator and respondent speech. (Ethnography of speaking, Middle American native language use, discourse analysis, mythology and folklore performance.)

In Tlaxcala and Puebla, Mexico, Nahuatl is being replaced by Spanish. Economic and social factors, principally a shift from a peripheral agrarian integration in the Mexican economy to integration as a rural proletariat involved in migratory labor, has been accompanied by a shift in language attitudes which has led to a narrowing of the range of functions of Nahuatl to a function primarily as a “language of solidarity.” This narrowing of function and the accompanying development of ethnic self-consciousness and egalitarianism are expressed through the stigmatization of Spanish loan words, other ethnic boundary-marking usages, the narrowing of honorific usage, and the differentiation of Nahuatl from Spanish grammar in noun-number constructions. (Nahuatl, Spanish, language shift, ethnicity.)

This paper examines the goals of prescriptive grammar and the causes and consequences of the rift between prescriptive and theoretical linguistics. It also proposes a principle for guiding prescriptive recommendations in the future as well as a theoretical framework and procedure for predicting the consequences of prescriptive recommendations. The procedure illustrates a hypothetical prescription: the substitution of singular they for prescriptive he. Projected benefits the prescription include neutral connotation, naturalness, simplicity, and lexical availability. Projected costs include covert and overt referential ambiguity; partial ambiguity; conceptual inaccuracy; loss of precision, imageability, impact, and memorability; bizarreness involving certain referents and case forms; distancing and dehumanizing connotations; unavailability of the ‘he or she’ denotation; potentially disruptive and long-lasting side effects on other areas of the language. Procedures are also illustrated for determining the relative frequency of such costs and benefits and for estimating the relative disruptiveness of the costs normal language use. Implications of the data for several issues general interest to linguistics and psychology are explored. (Ambiguity, language change, prescriptive grammar, theoretical linguistics, language planning, pronouns, neologisms.)

In Dell Hymes' review of J. E. Crawford's The Mobilian trade language (vol. 8, no. 3, December 1979), the sentence on page 470 should read: “Crawford has seen a copy and cites the paper's agreement with his conclusion that there is no evidence for Mobilian Jargon in pre-French times …” Language in Society regrets the error.