The study is based on analysis of videotaped conversation that occurred in five different settings involving various family members and medical professionals in a single pediatric case. We examine (1) the elaboration and condensation of information through spoken and written channels; (2) the negotiation of information exchanged in interactions characterized by different participant structures; and (3) the methodological benefit of examining interaction across contexts. We find that (a) information is negotiated, as well as discovered, during the medical interviews; and (b) information exchanged is often less resilient than participants' cognitive schemas which precede and apparently outlive the exchange of information in the interaction. These findings contribute to an understanding of the negotiation of meaning as well as the creation of context in interaction. (Discourse, interactional sociolinguistics, context, doctor–patient communication, spoken and written language, schema theory)

In recent years, research has increasingly pointed toward the universality of three linguistic constraints on code-switching: (1) an equivalence of structure constraint, (2) a size-of-constituent constraint, and (3) a free morpheme constraint. The evidence derived from this study challenges the universality of the first two of these constraints, and argues instead that their claim to universality is largely a function of the coincidental relative similarity in the syntactic structure of Spanish and English, the two languages upon which most code-switching studies have been based. The present study breaks out of the Spanish-English mold and draws upon data from a language contact situation in which the two languages are syntactically very different from each other, namely, Spanish and Hebrew. The evidence presented also challenges the frequently made assertion that type of code-switching, namely, intra- versus intersentential code-switching, is correlated with degree of bilingualism of the speaker. Finally, the evidence suggests that intrasentential code-switching ability cannot, as some have argued, universally be considered a measure of bilingualism nor a mark of the balanced bilingual. (Code-switching, Spanish, Hebrew, bilingualism, syntactic constraints)

This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor (“if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them”). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as it does over the general public. The author proposes ways in which the linguist's methodological tools can be sharpened so that the apparently untractable and yet fundamental issues of “language as a guide to social reality” can be studied in ways which are both linguistically precise and culturally revealing. Linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to the literature on the Australian society, “national character,” history, and culture. (Ethnolinguistics, Whorfian hypothesis, Australian English, speech acts, expressive derivation, names)

The problem confronted by many sociolinguists of assuring sufficient examples of a particular variable in their data is discussed, and a pilot study using various different data elicitation techniques is described. The most useful of these appears to be the reporter's test, which is described in detail. A further study is described, which, like the first, is on features of Welsh, and this supports the previous findings. From these studies we have evidence that the reporter's test not only has great predictive capacity, but also appears to produce casual styles of speech. The value of this for sociolinguists is clear. (Data collection, Welsh)

In 1962, Dell Hymes proposed the project he subsequently named the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1961, 1962, 1964b). Its central motive was to create a theory of linguistic communication which is grounded in the comparative analysis of many communities and their distinctive ways of speaking. Just as there is a comparative politics, law, religion, and so forth, he said, so should there be a comparative analysis of “studies ethnographic in basis and communicative in scope” (Hymes 1964b:9). Such studies would be “whole ethnographies focused on communicative behavior” (1964b:9) and would be guided by, and subsequently used to guide the revision of, a descriptive framework which itself is a model of sociolinguistic description.