Narratives are often overlooked in workplace talk, but they contribute in crucial ways to relationship building and identity construction in workplace interaction. In this article we analyse narratives told by skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds during a workplace internship conducted as part of a Workplace Communication course.…

Examines the syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of a corpus of 183 apologies in New Zealand English, within the context of an interaction model with 2 intersecting dimensions, affective and referential meaning, attempting to relate the relative "weightiness" of the offense to features of the apology. (53 references)…

Presents insights into how language research develops, with particular focus on the extent to which syllable-timing is a characteristic of the New Zealand English speech of certain ethnic and social groups. The discussion examines the development of hypotheses, methodological challenges and the importance of considering alternative interpretations…

Discusses how apologies are illuminating sources of information on the sociocultural values of a speech community, including differences between male and female values. These sex differences are examined in the distribution of apologies in order to shed light on the complexities encountered by language learners in acquiring communicative…

A social dialect survey of a New Zealand community documented a change in progress in the pronunciation of the vowels in words such as "air" and "ear." The data support a tentative interpretation that a shift to the variant with the closer onset for AIR words was initiated by middle-aged Pakeha women. (38 references) (Author/LB)

This article presents and discusses some exercises designed to help the second language learner develop both receptive and productive sociolinguistic competence. (Author)

Describes a range of forms and functions expressed by "you know," as well as its use by women and men in a corpus of spontaneous speech. Interesting contrasts were found in the most frequent functions expressed by "you know" in female and male usage. (Author/SED)

Among both first- and second-generation immigrant groups in New Zealand and Australia, women maintain the ethnic language (EL) longer than men. Compared with men's networks, women's networks encourage more extensive use of EL in social interactions, and women value the social and affective functions expressed by EL. (Contains 71 references.…

Presents examples of misunderstandings in compliment exchanges in different cultural contexts and analyzes them as instances of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure. Analysis of complimenting behavior norms forms the basis of a set of exercises designed to assist learners in developing the ability to recognize and use compliments…

A study investigated the variety of ways in which managers use language in sociolinguistically sensitive ways to get things done at work. Drawing on a database of over 300 interactions in a range of New Zealand workplaces, aspects of power (how things are accomplished), politeness (the importance of small talk), and solidarity (the difference…

Drawing on the results of sociolinguistic research in three ethnically different communities in Wellington, New Zealand, this paper explores and illustrates the process of language shift and language revival. Members of the Greek, Tongan, and Chinese communities were interviewed; and data were collected on their language proficiency, patterns of…

This article reviews certain generatively-based ideas on transactional behavior current in anthropology and discusses their relevance for sociolinguistics. The author finds that whereas sociolinguists tend to ignore such factors as social change and social mobility, anthropologists such as F. Barth ("Models of Social Behavior," 1966) express the…

Examines the constraints on the realization of "/t/" in New Zealander English. On the basis of an examination of the speech of two similar speakers from that country, a series of allophonic rules is provided. The article shows that the distribution of allophones for these speakers is not the same as for other speakers who have been…