Using the case of Serbo-Croatian linguistic terminology as an example, discusses some of the problems of standardizing vocabulary across two more more languages. (EKN)

Discusses the role that Europeans played in the process that led to pidginized languages, in particular to the development of Pidgin Sango, the "national language" of the Central African Republic. Contends that the manner in which the Europeans communicated with Central Africans was constrained by culturally conditioned "knowledge." (SED)

Gives an analysis of the way in which Spanish speakers in rural New Mexico gain metacommunicative competence. Suggests that native metacommunicative routines provide a rich source of sociolinguistic and social-cultural data and that awareness of these repertoires can assist field workers in using interviews more appropriately and effectively. (EKN)

Examination of the descriptive power of the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization proposes that the three-part exchange, a very important element of conversational interaction, is more adequate than the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization. (Author/CB)

Describes a turn-taking system, using examples from British television and radio networks. The turn-taking system of news interviews is compared to ordinary conversation and to two other types of broadcast interviews to reveal the institutionalized footings that interviewers are conventionally required to maintain within the interviews.…

The author suggests an evolutionary typology of languages and a way to integrate the concept of linguistic modernization with a theory of language problems. (Author/PM)

Examination of sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequency of various compliment response types in a corpus of 1,062 compliment events found several differences in men's and women's usage. Compliments from men were usually accepted, especially by female recipients, but compliments from women were met with a…

Uses transcripts of eight aviation accidents and 14 flight simulator sessions to study mitigation. A four-degree scale is developed to quantify the use of mitigation: (1) high mitigation; (2) low mitigation; (3) direct utterance; and (4) aggravation. Mitigation is sensitive to social rank and sometimes less effective than direct utterances in…

The Diola-Fogny of Senegal, West Africa, socially intuit with the meta-linguistic terms "big" and "thin" the tense/lax vowel contrast that is basic to their phonology. The two terms are primarily used to identify speech variation among individuals and groups. (Author/RM)

Critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specificity of human language. The study is a cross-cultural analysis of misconstrued communications in human interaction, ascertaining whether these interactions are crucially dependent on nonlinguistic variables. (CB)

In research on the historical present tense, neither interviews nor tape-recorded group sessions proved neutral or adequate. An explanation is found in the notion of a speech event, and simple techniques of participation are advocated. (Author/RM)

Research made possible by a National Science Foundation Institutional grant to the University of Arizona. (VM)

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)…

Analysis of doctors' and patients' oral accounts and responses during medical interactions, from the perspective of an interactional strategy linking social structure to social interaction, demonstrates how the medical interview is characterized by a moment-to-moment battle that mirrors and largely sustains the institutional authority and status…

The study describes the language situation of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and examines the factors governing the language choice of Sinhalese bilinguals while attempting to correlate such factors with domains and role relations. (Author/HP)