In this paper, children's use of access rituals in peer interaction in a nursery school is examined and a discussion of the implications of the findings regarding the development of communicative competence is presented. The findings show that entry into play is a production of some importance involving considerable time and strategy to accomplish, while leave-taking usually involves unmarked physical movement from play areas. The importance of peer interaction in the acquisition of access rituals and the necessity of studying children's verbal routines in natural settings are discussed. (Developmental sociolinguistics, peer interaction, children's use of access rituals, US English.)

The ethnographic analysis of categories is still largely based on assumptions of cultural uniformity, although, during the past decade, the significance of variation has become increasingly evident as attempts have been made to measure it. Delineation and measurement are themselves complex tasks, however. In a single body of data there may be variation according to many criteria which are often cross-cutting and reinforce each other irregularly. These issues are discussed in this paper in relation to different types and contexts of variation evident in animal classifications of the Nuaulu of eastern Indonesia. Yet, the kinds of assumptions made in formal studies of individual variation are as problematic as those concerning cultural uniformity. It is important to appreciate that the techniques and representations employed to describe classifications and their variation are often inadequate, concealing those things that are operationally of most significance and reifying ‘classifications’ which do not always exist in practice. The products of classifying behaviour inevitably reflect the immediate social conditions of the situations in which they are used. (Analysis of categories, cultural variability, ethnozoology, social context; Nuaulu of eastern Indonesia.)

This appendix suggests a number of measures which may be readily calculated in respect of data on lexical usage to provide an indication of the degree of variation in such usage. It introduces and briefly discusses five straightforward measures of variation or consensus which apply to the case where any informant has been constrained to give only one response per stimulus item. None of these measures is, strictly speaking, a statistical measure, although p is almost so in terms of its logic and the D-measures have a form familiar to that of a wide class of elementary statistics. Each measure in fact generates a numerical index which relates to an arithmetical property of the data in question: the measures are not in general estimates of population parameters. The use is heuristic, exploratory and comparative: by systematically reducing the information which comprises the data, the measures should help the investigator to become more aware of the salient characteristics of the data to hand.

Aboriginal Australians are celebrated for their use of linguistic devices to mark the subtleties of social situation and relationship. Three sorts of phenomenon are widely reported (see Capell 1962; Dixon 1972: 19): (1) special vocabulary is often associated with male initiation (see, for example, Hale 1971); (2) there is often extensive word tabooing, usually involving strict prohibition on names of deceased people, as well as on words that sound like such names (for examples of such practices across Cape York Peninsula, see Roth 1903); and (3) many societies have so-called ‘Mother-in-law’ languages – special vocabularies that replace all or part of the normal lexicon in speech between kin who stand in certain avoidance relationships to one another. Prototypically across the continent, a man must avoid his own mother-in-law. Such vocabularies have been reported from widely separated areas, but the most detailed and best-known descriptions involve languages of North Queensland (see Thomson 1935; Dixon 1971, 1972). The material I discuss in this paper is of the last type and comes also from Cape York Peninsula.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an aspect of the adaptive property of languages. While scholars have shown that expansion in function is correlated with expansion of the linguistic structure, I show that a loss of function by a language may entail a loss of a particular linguistic distinction. The data used to illustrate this point are drawn from the bilingual community of Cuzco, Peru. (Language contact, the adaptive property of languages, linguistic variation, linguistic change.)