African American English (AAE) refers to the systematic, rule-governed linguistic patterns of found among African Americans. This article provides an overview of AAE. More specifically, the article enumerates the historical underpinnings associated with AAE, identifies a representative set of AAE characteristics, reviews relevant research, and…

What are the chances of a dyad of Spanish-speaking strangers using informal address in casual, initial interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, today? To discover the pattern(s) of contemporary address, the Principal Investigator (PI) conducted a sociolinguistic experiment focusing on strangers' initial interactions to minimize the influence of…

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalan, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages,…

Using heuristic inquiry, this study investigates how dialect affects the ethnic identity development of the first author as well as fellow Lumbee students attending a predominantly white university. Heuristic inquiry is a process that begins with a question or problem that the researcher seeks to illuminate or answer. Findings from this study…

This study examined linguistic patterns in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, a group that has rarely been studied from a sociolinguistic perspective. Participants were 92 girls, 10-12 years old, who attend a school where Yiddish is the language of instruction and Hebrew, Israel's official language, is studied only in religious…

Pragmatics is included in one of four communicative competences (Canale, 1980). It is necessary and important to teach pragmatics at school in our globalized world in order to avoid as much as misunderstanding, which is likely to stem from cultural difference. As a result, greater importance should be attached to diverse customs and pragmatics.…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this…

The author found through experimentation that a well-used metaphor can facilitate persuasion and attitude change. The author's hypothesis is that inclusion of similes will increase persuasiveness but that use of metaphors instead of similes would have a greater effect in attitude change. (MS)

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)

This article focuses on a detailed description of patterns of address in Dili Tetum today. It outlines the complexities of the address system and points to considerable variation in its evolving present-day use. We find, amongst other things, that a speaker may use a range of address strategies even to the same addressee, and that the use of…

This article examines how kindergarten-children are differentiated and segregated through vocal practices and processes. The analysis is based on empirical data, which originate from a long ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark. The author presents two different language tones: "a teaching tone and an exchange tone" and shows a pattern in…

Basil Bernstein's research on the sociology of language indicates that he views language as both subjective and objective. Subjectively, it structures an individual's intentions and thought processes; objectively, it preserves and makes public the store of knowledge of human society. The sharing of language is the basic way in which the objective…

Discusses the results of a study of utterance functions in preschool children to demonstrate that, within a certain conversation, whether social or intellectual, subjects may make both social and intellectual utterances, rendering distinction between the two types of utterances very dubious. (Author/CB)