Challenging the notion that women are necessarily always more polite than men (as language and gender literature claim), Sara Mills discusses the complex relationship between gender and politeness. Mills argues that, although women speakers, drawing on stereotypes of femininity, can appear to be acting more politely than men, there are many circumstances where women will act as "impolitely" as men.

The news interview has become a major vehicle for presenting broadcast news and political commentary. This book examines the place of the news interview in Anglo-American broadcasting as well as its historical development in the United States and Britain. It discusses the fundamental norms and conventions that shape conduct in the modern interview, including the linguistic and interactional practices of journalists. Through analyses of well-known interviews, the book explores the relationship between journalists and public figures, and reveals the tensions lying beneath the surface of the...

This study identifies key mechanisms through which a young child operates with external knowledge in his/her immediate social context. Central to this is the child's capacity to draw on discourse-based understandings that have become evident in prior interaction. In contrast to studies that analyze development under different headings, such as language, emotions and cognition, Tony Wootton links these aspects in his examination of the state of understanding that exists at any given moment in interaction. The result is a distinctive social constructionist approach to children's development.

Conversations between AIDS counselors and their clients bring delicate and potentially threatening issues into play. In this study Anssi Perä kylä applies the principles of conversation analysis to his exploration of AIDS counseling, using data from video-recorded counseling sessions in a London teaching hospital, and analyzes the design and placement of questions in these situations. His conclusions provide a timely and illuminating insight into the management of a sensitive topic through various techniques of indirectness.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the...

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross-purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by tracing the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers' distinctive ways of communicating and relating, thus highlighting the pitfalls of hidden assumptions underlying talk.

The essays in this volume are all original contributions dealing in one way or another with the analysis of prosody - primarily intonation and rhythm - and the role it plays in everyday conversation.

To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between...

Throughout Western society there are now strong pressures for social and racial integration but, in spite of these, recent experience has shown that greater intergroup contact can actually reinforce social distinctions and ethnic stereotypes. The studies collected here examine, from a broad sociological perspective, the sorts of face-to-face verbal exchange that are characteristic of industrial societies, and the volume as a whole pointedly demonstrates the role played by communicative phenomena in establishing and reinforcing social identity. The method of analysis that has been adopted...

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languages and cultures. A motive...