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.…

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…

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)

The purpose of the model is to select either Spanish or English as the language to be used; its goals at this stage of development include modeling code-switching for lexical need, apparently random code-switching, dependency of code-switching upon sociolinguistic context, and code-switching within syntactic constraints. (EJS)

Tests Ervin-Tripps's hypotheses concerning the relationship between several social and ecological factors and the choice of directive variants in English, using as a sample a predominantly Black male migratory agricultural labor population. Found that most of the predictions derived from Ervin-Tripp's model for these directive variants were…

Discusses glosses, that is, formulations which, on their occurrence, are adequate but which turn out to have been incomplete, ambiguous and perhaps misleading. Examines the ways in which a coparticipant's activities may result in a speaker either maintaining or revealing the gloss. (SED)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985; 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. (20 references) (GLR)

In an investigation of the use of the word "hey" in pseudoquotations, invented quotations, in current English communication, tokens (n=26) were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings. A speaker uses quote formula + hey + pseudoquotation to dramatize and give emphasis to an important point. (72…

Presents theory of "audience design" which assumes that speakers design their style of talk for their audience, and examines how speakers do this. Also examines the effects on style shift of nonpersonal factors (such as topic and setting) and of referees (the class of persons with whom the speaker identifies). (SED)

An analysis of gender differences in the use of compliments in one genre of written discourse is presented based on a set of 47 peer reviews of academic papers written by graduate students in the form of letters. Women are found to make greater use of compliment intensifiers and personal referencing than are men. (49 references) (Author/LB)

Analyzes argumentative talk as a sociable function among some ethnic groups. Even though speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods, they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The cultural relativity of norms of evaluation…

Presents a systematic investigation of the factors underlying the choice of personal reference. Five experiments examine how native-English-speaking undergraduates of Brown University refer to a professor or student in various situations. The Rule of Polite Reference (RPR) explains how speakers choose the way they will refer to a person in a given…

This paper considers two classes of conversational errors: production errors and interactional errors. It is proposed that error correction can be used to invoke alternatives to concepts of persons, situation and relationships. (CK)

Narratives from part-Hawaiian children 5 to 12 years old in a variety of circumstances were collected for several years. Typical verbal routines, ways of analyzing the data, tendency of routines to structure speech events, functions of nonnarrative routines in narrative performance, and establishing a context for narration are considered. (EJS)

Examines the organization and function of information-withholding sequences, a conversational strategy used by participants in gossip interaction on Nukulaelae, a Polynesian Central Pacific atoll. Withholding sequences illustrate how ambiguity and repairs can be exploited to meet the communicative demands of particular interactional contexts. (62…