The role of the particle "o.k." in service encounter dialogue is discussed. A service encounter is defined as a situation of interaction between a "posted" server and a second party (a customer) who invokes the server's participation as an operator of a "serving post." It is suggested that approval or acceptance is often only part of what is being…

A study of code-switching, the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same interaction. Code-switching as interpreted in this study is a meta-interactional cue which is activated to signal a change in direction of the interaction. Such a response to the interaction process is considered significant. (AMH)

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

Explores perspectives and methodologies that sociolinguistics brings to ethnographic research in schools. The article identifies the methodological contributions arising from linguistics that interactional sociolinguistics and microethnograpy share, such as the use of naturally occurring language data, the consultation of native intuition, and…

This paper considers a distinction frequently used in sociolinguistics and ethnography of speaking to describe speech events: their formality or informality. Three principle meanings of "formality" found in the literature concern whether the formality relates to properties of a communicative code, properties of the social setting in…

Forms of address in Afghan society reflect the relationships between the speakers as well as the society's structure. In Afghan Persian, or Dari, first, second, and last names have different semantic dimensions. Boys' first names usually consist of two parts or morphemes, of which one may be part of the father's name. Girls' names usually consist…

Analyzes an Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to mixed audience. Dialect alternants signal switching between contrasting styles in both. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings, and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and…

Focuses on arguments among White American children in a small town in New England, Black American children of migrant harvesters, and rural Hindi-speaking Fiji Indian children. Findings suggest that, while repetition, inversion, and escalation are common to all three cultures, there is considerable variation as to how they are used. (EJS)

Describes a pattern of verbal disputing frequently engaged in by children in Hawaii who have some Polynesian ancestry. This pattern, which is characterized by the forceful use of "not!" as an outright contradiction of one speaker by another, is traced from early childhood into adolescence in the context of relationships in which it develops. (EJS)

This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic…

A pilot study was conducted as part of a larger sociological investigation of small group interaction. Specifically, the study dealt with communication in three first-grade advanced reading groups, each composed of 15 children, and focused on two types of requests: those for action and those for information. Student interactions were audio- and…

Little is known about how children gain interpersonal access in settings where adults are not present or are unavailable. This study sought to describe children's strategies for access into and withdrawal from peer interactive episodes in a nursery school. Data were collected from direct observations of two groups of children. One group attended…

This study of code switching among Puerto Rican children attending a New York City public school focuses primarily upon the correlation between interaction rules, as perceived by the participants, and code switching. Code switching strategies of a seven-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a 10-year-old girl in the bilingual third grade class…