Recent work on the occurrence of "uh" and "uhm" in ordinary talk-in-interaction is concerned almost exclusively with its relation to trouble in the speech production process. After touching briefly on this environment of occurrence, this conversation-analytic article focuses attention on several interactional environments in which "uh(m)" figures…

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians who live in Panama City, Panama. The goal of this study is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Spanish-Creole English bilinguals in the local communities of this region, by employing…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…

Discusses the relationship between the brain, language, and communication in the following sections: (1) combining words, (2) language as a system, (3) language as a function of the brain, (4) the science of communication, and (5) language as a social institution. (NCR)

The phenomena of overlapping talk is examined. In numerous types of conversational exchanges, people briefly acknowledge the utterance that overlapped their own and then recycle an overlapped utterance and/or introduce a new topic. Three types of objects are illustrated and discussed: an acknowledgment token, an assessment, and a commentary. (four…

This paper discusses a previously unidentified turn-allocation technique - third person reference. When such a reference is used, participants are orienting to the solution of a practical organizational problem: how to keep at least one of their number from talking, while preserving the right of all others to talk. (Author/CFM)

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

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)

This paper examines language variation in terms of overdetermination and underdetermination of structural information as related to grammatical rules and the structure of social behavior. (CLK)

Presents a case study in which the use of intricate varieties of levels of honorifics in Japanese is more complicated than traditional sociolinguistics has shown. The buraku (Japanese barrio) treated here is situated in the west part of Honshu, Japan, and consists of 13 households. (CHK)

A sociological critique of language which substitutes the notion of acceptability for grammaticallity; the analogy of symbolic force for communication; the question of the value and power of discourse for meaning; and "symbolic capital," inseparable from the social position of the interlocuter, for purely linguistic competence. (Text is in…

Reviews and synthesizes speech act analysis (Austin and Searles), politeness phenomena (Brown and Levinson), rules affecting speaking (Hymes), and activity analysis (Wittgenstein). Advances the notion that the theories are complementary rather than contradictory. (EKN)

In studying sociolinguistic rules, researchers must be aware of some guiding principles: that (1) these rules are below the conscious level of awareness, and (2) rules of speaking differ across cultural groups, with none being more correct than another. Even when members of different cultural groups interact in the same language they may find it…