In the reporting of a situation or event, a speaker can sometimes be seen to have omitted or ‘glossed over’ a constituent component. There are times when that component is something a speaker would rather not have the coparticipant know. Sometimes, however, the speaker is willing, indeed eager, to share this material with the coparticipant, but is constrained from simply producing it then and there (the matter being possibly bizarre, risqué, or in other ways problematic). In either case, whether the problematic component is delivered or not (i.e., whether a ‘gloss’ is ‘unpackaged’) can depend upon what the coparticipant does. This report focuses on the ways in which a coparticipant's activities are implicated in the maintaining as-is, or unpackaging, of a ‘glossed’ component. (Sociology, psychology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics)

This study relates to two strands of research into children's communicative competence: the study of children's conflict behavior and the study of ritualized communicative activities through which children construct, maintain, and strategically negotiate their social world (e.g., Brenneis & Lein 19p; Lein & Brenneis 1978; Boggs 1978; Corsaro 1979; Morgan, O'Neill, & Harre 1979; Goodwin, 1980). A number of ethnographic studies have been specifically concerned with the analysis of culturally situated, ritualized, agonistic events. Notably, the series of studies concerned with the language form known as “sounding” or “playing the dozens” among black American youth in the United States (e.g., Abrahams 1962; Kochman 1972, 1981; Labov 1972; Mitchell-Kernan 1972), the study of verbal dueling among Turkish boys (Dundes, Leach, & Ozkok 1972), or the study of ritualized fighting among the Irish men of Tory Island (Fox 1977).

This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and express the results of this analysis in a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes such a metalanguage and illustrates her approach with numerous detailed semantic analyses. She suggests that analyses of speech acts and speech genres carried out in terms of English folk labels are ethnocentric and unsuitable for crosscultural comparison. She tries to show how folk labels of speech acts and speech genres characteristic of a given language reflect salient features of the culture associated with that language, and how the use of the proposed semantic metalanguage, derived from natural language, helps to achieve the desired double goal of insight and rigor in this area of study. (Speech acts, speech genres, semantics, lexicography, language and culture)

This chapter [of Sociolinguistic patterns – RWF] will deal with the study of language structure and evolution within the social context of the speech community. The linguistic topics to be considered here cover the area usually named “general linguistics,” dealing with phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (Labov 1972:184). Surely, this is too narrow a conception of the role of sociolinguistic research (Romaine 1982:6).