Language in Action: New Studies of Language in Society: Essays in Honor of Roger W. Shuy (review)

This volume consists of 31 papers in 6 parts; the papers have been contributed by 34 authors—all but 5 from the United States. In the introduction (1–16), Peyton and Griffin characterize the work of the honoree and then give an overview of the volume, with each paper receiving a paragraph. Readers will appreciate the wide variety of topics.

In Part 1, ‘Language and the fabric of society’, the papers are based on research in the U.S., Australia, and Hungary. Among the topics dealt with are the need to give endangered dialects the same consideration that dying languages are receiving; the advantages that studies of spoken language would gain from socially oriented research in sign languages; and the importance of taking into account the history of Spanish and of speakers of Spanish in the U.S. when language policies are discussed and proposed.

Part 2, ‘Language and cultural belief systems’, begins with papers emphasizing the need to understand the use of language and literacy in religious contexts among disempowered groups such as Mexican women in Chicago and the Songhay of Niger and Mali. In another paper the author urges the study of folk linguistic beliefs because the attitude speakers exhibit toward their language is likely to influence the course of its future development (this is particularly true of languages of small-scale societies).

Part 3, ‘Features of language in communication’, may be of interest to students of the ethnography of speaking. For example, Deborah Tannen in her ‘Indirectness at work’ (189–212) challenges the assumption that talking in an indirect way necessarily reveals a lack of self-confidence or powerlessness on the part of the speaker. Three papers in this section are microanalytic, focusing on the uses of ain’t, you, and just. Among the conclusions is Bruce Fraser’s contention that just is a ‘semantic operator whose interpretation is constant across cases’ (268).

In Part 4, ‘Places of language use in society’, the contributors demonstrate how widely the settings in which language use has been studied differ. For one paper the setting is a cockpit of an airplane; in others it is an industrial enterprise that labels its products, the office of a political consultant, or a small-town courtroom.

Part 5, ‘Language in education’, gives examples of the impact of sociolinguistics in the field of education. Three out of its eight papers deal with various aspects of the educational experience of students who speak minority dialects of English. Three papers are concerned with specific types of instructional sequences and strategies—classroom transitions, the collaborative nature of classroom discourse, and the different contexts that can influence the quality of written communication. The settings of the last two papers are Finland and Australia respectively. The author of the first argues that foreign language learning should be considered in the light of social factors that form the foundation of language use. The last paper shows that the placement of pupils in different ability classes is influenced by their ethnic and geographic background.

Part 6 examines ‘language of the young and old’. The first paper is a study of mother-child verbal interactions over the period of a year. The second reports on the interactions of 21 young children in a day-care setting who were videotaped weekly for six months as they played and interacted with their peers and with adults. This report includes nonverbal behavioral data. The final paper focuses on 58 personal letters of the family of George Oppen, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, whose cognitive abilities decreased as the result of Alzheimer’s disease.

This volume contains some subjects not previously explored, and the authors use a variety of methodologies. Given the book’s topical richness, a good index would have been helpful.