In this paper a context where receptive multilingualism represents a communicative strategy of adjustment in a context of second language acquisition is discussed. The traditional scope of receptive multilingualism has been extended to multilingual environments resulting from an experience of mobility, namely transnational adoptive families.…

Our everyday language use is mostly intuitive (Lieberman, 2000), in the sense of tacit and automatic, and it reveals ourselves in what we say and how we say it. In this study I use the interaction order--the idea that social facts such as identity are constituted by social interaction--to interpret a research interview that was threatened by my…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Communication in international meetings represents a challenge for the participants, who need to make choices about the language(s) they use to co-construct meaning and guarantee the success of their work. In this context, plurilingual interactions may offer an invaluable opportunity for power balanced relations and intercultural flexibility. In…