In urban American telephone conversations, we propose, the final exchange of goodbyes doesn't terminate the conversation per se but brings to completion a process of leave-taking in which the two parties reaffirm their acquaintance before breaking contact. This process is optional, so that if the two parties are not acquainted, they should omit the process and not exchange goodbyes. We tested this proposal by examining goodbyes offered to operators in routine inquiries to a university switchboard. In requests for a single number, callers offered goodbye only 39 percent of the time. This percentage increased, however, (1) when callers asked for more personally revealing information, (2) when callers felt more appreciation for the information they received, as indicated by their use of thank you very much instead of thank you, and (3) when operators revealed more about themselves by making and then correcting their own mistakes. These and other findings suggest that the more closely acquainted the caller and operator feel they have become, the more likely the caller is to want to reaffirm acquaintance and say goodbye.

“Class relations” will be taken to refer to inequalities in the distribution of power and in principles of control between social groups, which are realized in the creation, distribution, reproduction, and legitimation of physical and symbolic values that have their source in the social division of labor. In terms of the particular problems of the relationships between class and the process of its cultural reproduction, as developed in this thesis, what has to be shown is how class regulation of the distribution of power and of principles of control generates, distributes, reproduces, and legitimates dominating and dominated principles regulating the relationships within and between social groups and so forms of consciousness. What we are asking here is how the distribution of power and principles of control are transformed, at the level of the subject, into different, invidiously related, organizing principles, in such a way as both to position subjects and to create the possibility of change in such positioning. The broad answer given by this thesis is that class relations generate, distribute, reproduce, and legitimate distinctive forms of communication, which transmit dominating and dominated codes, and that subjects are differentially positioned by these codes in the process of their acquisition. “Positioning” is used here to refer to the establishing of a specific relation to other subjects and to the creating of specific relationships within subjects. In general, from this point of view, codes are culturally determined positioning devices. More specifically, class regulated codes position subjects with respect to dominating and dominated form of communication and to the relationships between them. Ideology is constituted through and in such positioning. From this perspective, ideology inheres in and regulates modes of relation. Ideology is not so much a content as a mode of relation for the realizing of contents.

This paper reviews the work on sociolinguistic aspects of the recent immigration of foreign workers and their families from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean countries of the Middle East and North Africa to West Germany. The continued presence of these foreigners presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and subsequent stages of contact-induced linguistic development in adults and children. The situation is particularly interesting here because many of the languages involved (Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) are typologically different from each other and from German.

The linguistic domain of idiomaticity poses many problems for the study of language form, use, and variation. With selected aspects of idiomaticity as a starting point, I will attempt in this paper to develop a description of the use of idioms as a segment of a more general theory of language use. Evidence for this approach is drawn from international amateur radio talk (IART) in English.

In this paper, a preschool children's game is analyzed with reference to patterns of address used by intimates in beginning utterances. The findings reveal that the alternation between real and pretend names functions to mark context shifts in the nature of the activities, and to delineate role relationships among the participants along the dimensions of power and affiliation. It is suggested that variations in how children address one another provide insight into their understanding of a system of social relations. (Peer interaction; developmental sociolinguistics; social behavior, children's address patterns; American English).

Ain't occurs as a sociolinguistic variable in working class speech in the town of Reading, England. The phonetic realizations of ain't in Reading English do not accord with traditional etymologies, depending more on the syntactic environment in which ain't occurs than on the standard English forms from which they are usually assumed to derive. The phonetic variants are also marked for semantic function in tag questions. Variation in the use of ain't can be explained as reflecting an ongoing linguistic change (sociolinguistics, dialectology, language change, theoretical linguistics).

This study into the nature of “the floor” actually began as an open-ended inquiry into sex differences that might occur beyond the sentence level in the multi-party interaction of five informal committee meetings. Technical difficulties prompted the trying out of several different transcription displays, most of which failed to capture the “feel” of the interaction and each of which biased (in its own way) the perception of what had actually gone on. The type of unconventional display eventually used was intended to show the floor holder in the center of the page, flanked by co-occurring talk. Because there were many episodes for which a single floor holder could not be identified, the primary focus of the study shifted to the nature of the floor itself. Questions about sex differences became a secondary and succeeding focus.

In the analysis, “floor” and “turn” were distinguished on the basis of “participant-sense” rather than technical criteria. Two kinds of floors were subjectively identified: F1, a singly developed floor; and F2, a collaborative venture where several people seemed to be either operating on the same wavelength or engaging in a free-for-all. The two kinds of floors were differentiated objectively by such features as quantity and frequency participation, language functions, number of nonturn utterances, overlaps, and pauses. There were indeed sex/language differences, but these were related to the type of floor being developed. Men took more and longer turns and did more of the joking, arguing, directing, and soliciting of responses F1 's. Turn length and frequency differences were neutralized in F2's, and certain language functions were used by women to a greater extent in F2's than in F1 's. (Conversational analysis, gender and language, qualitative research methodology.)

I shall argue that adoption of linguistics at institutions of higher learning in its present international disciplinary form, and in its expression through the medium of English (because English is a major foreign or second language in much of the world and the by far dominant language for the discipline of linguistics), can be contrary to the public good in less developed countries (LDCs) and emerging speech communities. Linguistics in its current international disciplinary form serves needs different from those of emerging speech communities, where a new language treatment system ought to be created by a new cadre of caretakers of the community's language resources. (Language planning; developing countries; linguistics as an international discipline; English)

The verbal style of middle-class and lower-class ten-year-old children was assessed in a descriptive communication task using three different types of stimulus items: standard visual, tactual, and items embedded in a narrative. In a partial replication of Heider's (1971) work it was found that lower-class children used a global descriptive style to communicate information about standard visual (abstract) stimuli, whereas middle-class children used an analytic style. Group differences also were observed with tactually input stimuli, although the lower-class responses shifted toward an analytic style. However, both middle-class and lower-class children used an analytic style to describe stimulus items when they were embedded in a narrative context. In addition, order effects were observed, suggesting that lower-class children use an analytic style with standard visual stimuli if they perceive this style as situationally appropriate. Social class differences in verbal style are not only a function of type of stimulus item, but are also a function of strategies applied in the communicative situation.

Recent work in the analysis of conversational discourse has included the study of compliment responses among English-speaking American monolinguals (Pomerantz 1978). This preliminary work suggests that compliment responses are subject to separate constraint systems that involve the receiver's obligation to respond to a compliment while at the same time avoiding self-praise.

This paper examines compliment responses, within the framework provided by Pomerantz, in conversational interactions between bilingual Mexican-American speakers. The strategies used by these speakers are compared with those used by monolingual English-speaking Americans and with those used by monolingual Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.

A discourse-oriented classroom activity in an ethnically mixed, first grade classroom is studied from an interpretive perspective, integrating ethnographic observation and fine-grained conversational analysis. “Sharing time” is a recurring activity where children are called upon to describe an object or give a narrative account about some past event to the entire class. The teacher, through her questions and comments, tries to help the children structure and focus their discourse. This kind of activity serves to bridge the gap between the child's home-based oral discourse competence and the acquisition of literate discourse features required in written communication.

Through a detailed characterization of the children's sharing styles, evidence is provided suggesting that children from different backgrounds come to school with different narrative strategies and prosodic conventions for giving narrative accounts. When the child's discourse style matches the teacher's own literate style and expectations, collaboration is rhythmically synchronized and allows for informal practice and instruction in the development of a literate discourse style. For these children, sharing time can be seen as a kind of oral preparation for literacy. In contrast, when the child's narrative style is at variance with the teacher's expectations, collaboration is often unsuccessful and, over time, may adversely affect school performance and evaluation. Sharing time, then, can either provide or deny access to key literacy-related experiences, depending, ironically, on the degree to which teacher and child start out “sharing” a set of discourse conventions and interpretive strategies. (Urban communication, ethnic/subcultural differences in discourse style, the transition to literacy, American English.)

Opinions assume a paradoxical character in many speech events. The speaker, by sincerely presenting his views on a topic, is expressing his belief in a proposition, and this belief must be regarded as indisputable. If a speaker says that marijuana should be legalized, one cannot deny the speaker's belief in this proposition. He has expressed an opinion. The proposition, however, may itself be the topic of dispute. Another speaker may disagree by expressing his belief that marijuana should remain illegal, and a dispute regarding the validity of each of these propositions may ensue. Neither of these propositions is subject to proof or disproof, but the speakers may attempt to support them in order to add to the validity of the propositions and substantiate their beliefs.

An illocutionary act presupposes not only a speaker, but also an other who is the intended recipient of the utterance's illocutionary force. Thus every illocutionary act has an intersubjective component; it connects two centers of experience in a particular way. This article proposes that the intersubjective illocutionary force of an utterance depends on (1) whether it concerns the speaker's or other's experience, (2) whether it takes the speaker's or other's viewpoint, and (3) whether or not the speaker must presume specific knowledge of the other to make the utterance. These three dichotomous principles of classification are called source of experience, frame of reference, and focus, respectively. The eight possible combinations of “speaker” and “other” values define a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of families of intersubjective illocutionary acts – Disclosure, Advisement, Edification, Confirmation, Question, Interpretation, Acknowledgment, and Reflection – which I have elsewhere called “verbal response modes.” The modes are associated with characteristic grammatical forms, which retain a “formal” portion of their illocutionary force even when used to express a different intent, yielding a taxonomy of 64 distinct form-intent combinations. Differences between this taxonomy and other taxonomies of illocutionary acts are partially traceable to the present system's roots in the study of psychotherapeutic processes and the previous systems' roots in the study of explicit performatives.

A recent issue of this journal carried an analysis of the theoretical status of variable rules by the present authors (Kay & McDaniel 1979) together with a response by D. Sankoff and W. Labov (1979). The central issue with which Kay and McDaniel dealt was the following: which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions embodied in variable rules may reasonably be attributed to the linguistic abilities of speakers? The Sankoff and Labov response has gone some distance toward clarifying their position in this matter, though problematical issues remain. The basic question divides naturally into two related, though distinct, parts: (1) which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions comprised in the variable rule method are to be taken as substantive claims (versus conveniences for the data analyst)? (2) of the mathematical assumptions which are held to make substantive claims, what is the empirical locus of these claims – that is, what are the claims about (e.g., speakers' linguistic abilities)?