While traditional views of literacy assume that discourse is either written or oral, an alternative perspective considers different discourse samples as part of the linguistic repertoire of the speech community. Placing this perspective in a sociolinguistic context and taking language use rather than form as the starting point for analysis, it is…

Analyzes spoken and written Hindi and Indian English texts and explores relationship between gender and communication. The features associated with each discourse type in informal female same-sex conversations and in written same-sex dialogues in each language are described. (Author/LMO)

Twelve papers on codeswitching are reviewed briefly in this introduction to a special journal issue. The following topics are covered: borrowing versus codeswitching, codeswitching in a political discourse context, situational uses. (16 references) (LB)

The bilingual discourse strategy of alternating languages as language game boundaries is examined, and language alternation is argued to be one of the features of bilingual discourse according to which speakers negotiate where one language game ends and the next one begins. The iconicity of the patterns of language alternation (discourse,…

Determines the status of ambiguous lone English-origin nouns in Persian discourse. Utilizing the variationist comparative method, their distribution and conditioning are analyzed and they are compared to their counterparts in unmixed English. Results show remarkable similarities between treatment of native Persian nouns, attested loanwords, and…

Five ethnographic studies located genres of public discourse most central to university students, thus enhancing understanding of those genres as a significant influence on students' use of language. The problem of divergence between school-based genres and genres of public discourse were addressed. Results highlighted are audience roles, sites of…

Explores the use of English in Cypriot Greek, focusing on extensive data from informal conversations between members of a Limassol family. Suggests that instances of language alternation can be accounted for in terms of discourse analytic categories such as the distinction between local and global phenomena and the tri-partite scheme of…

This study examined the code-switching patterns in the speech of immigrant Spanish-speaking children. Seven- and 10-year-old boys and girls from bilingual classrooms were each paired with a mutually selected friend, and their speech was collected in two contexts: while the children waited for an expected science experiment and when they worked…

The present article examines one property of bilingual speech--convergence--and strives towards explanatory depth by attending to the insights of the antecedent research in formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. In particular, the paper adopts as a point of departure (and further substantiates) the argument that convergence…

The starting point of this thesis is the hypothesis that in Spanish there are conventionalized expressions that signal both the articulation of text parts and the speaker's attitude towards the utterance. "Pragmatic Expressions" (PEs) are fixed lexical forms that contribute to text creation in relation to the context of enunciation, are oriented…

This paper illustrates increases in the use of English in political speeches in post-Suharto Indonesia by analyzing the phonological, morphological, and syntactic assimilation of loanwords (linguistic borrowing), as well as hybridization and code switching, and phenomena such as doubling and loan translations. The paper also examines the mixed…

This study analyzes a corpus of 1500 sentences uttered by a child bilingual in Italian and German between the ages of 3.9 and 4.5. Only 89 sentences show instances of lexical interference. (CFM)

Examines a specific type of code switching that occurs when bilingual peers make relevant their dual and simultaneous membership in the two groups symbolized by the two linguistic varieties involved in the switching pattern. Structural constraints and switching are discussed across code-switching types. (31 references) (Author/OD)

Research on language in Hong Kong is reviewed, focusing on work in the areas of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and survey research. Discourse analysis studies examined include research on classroom language, discourse in other settings such as work environments, business telephone communication, news media discourse, and student language…

Using the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic perspectives, this study points out some directions for the sociological and linguistic analyses of simulation-games based on inspection of video-recordings of actual examples of second language learner game participation. (Author/SED)