Volume 28, Issue 1

This paper draws on the recently theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity and micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic processes shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity in Chinese languages, images of linguistic stability and homogeneity overlie the societal diversity that characterises every real social environment. The monoglot ideologies focused on Putonghua often present obstacles for migrant workers whose Putonghua proficiency is limited, and disqualify their existing language resources and skills. Three vignettes will illustrate this. The first one demonstrates the presence and influence of Putonghua in an eastern coastal city through a story told by a migrant child; the second vignette reveals how a migrant worker's regional accent is misrecognised in the interactions with the locals; and the third vignette illustrates how a migrant worker is polyglot in one language and how this polyglot repertoire is organised indexically in relation to layered and stratified spaces. Therefore the monoglot ideologies often disqualify some people's linguistic resources; many migrant workers nevertheless develop a polyglot repertoire and navigate such obstacles.

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so that the informativeness of their contribution is minimized in overlap. This paper approaches the linguistic composition of overlaps by examining the information status and grammatical function of noun phrases within and outside of overlaps. The statistical findings indicate a tendency to avoid delivering new information in overlap, which suggests that speakers are indeed cooperating with their interlocutors by minimizing utterance informativeness during overlap.

This paper attempts to show ways in which two Thai brothers (aged 9 and 13) living temporarily in the United States, employ bilingual code-switching to organize their conversation. Using the sequential analysis developed by Auer (1984, 1995), this paper describes how the two boys employ code-switching to negotiate the language for the interaction and accommodate the language competences and preferences of conversational participants, as well as to organize conversational tasks such as turn-taking, preference marking, repair, and bracketing of side-sequences. The sequential analysis suggests that code-switching is used by the two boys as an additional communicative resource to achieve particular conversational goals.

The aim of the study is to identify and interpret the exact aspects of Greek interlanguage modification which present deviations from native usage. As such, it is an investigation of Greek ESL university students' request modification and a comparison to British English native speakers. More specifically, it concentrates on the mitigating function of lexical/phrasal modifiers and of external supportive moves in socially similar situations and examines whether the two language/cultural groups use combinations of internal/external modifiers in the same way and to the same extent. The study aims to make a contribution to the field of interlanguage pragmatics by identifying pragmatic requestive features which characterise second language speech acts and can therefore benefit from pedagogical attention. This study found the learners to display an underuse of lexical/phrasal downgraders (internal modification) as compared to native speakers, and to generally use more supportive moves (external modification). The learners used more combinations of supportive moves than native speakers did but fewer combinations of internal modification devices, thus exhibiting a rather restricted pragmatic repertoire in their production. These results are compatible with previous interlanguage studies.