Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse By Deborah Tannen (review)

REVIEWS341 from the outside. They objected to the fact that the program was not a nationwide one but was being introduced only in a relatively small set of designated schools. There were also both local and regional political factors that worked against long-term acceptance of the bilingual program in Kinsachata, factors connected with the professional or social roles and ambitions of particular individuals. By looking closely at the results of the contrasting programs followed in the Visallani and Kinsachata schools, H is able to show that early primary school education in the mother tongue had clear benefits for local children in terms of instructional outcome. By looking closely at the two Quechua-speaking communities , however, she is able to show why relative instructional success is not compelling enough or even a perceptible enough outcome to have led the Kinsachata people to want to continue the bilingual program. She draws the unavoidable conclusion that bilingual education in and of itself is not a sure-fire agent of language maintenance, but that certain societal conditions must prevail in order for a bilingual education program to function as a support for a minority language. In the Quechua case, effective bilingual schooling would surely decrease the isolation which has done much to protect Quechua from replacement by Spanish over the centuries. However, if decreased isolation were counterbalanced by a general increase in the societal range of uses for Quechua and in opportunities for social mobility via Quechua as well as via Spanish (which would require a national rather than merely a regional promotion of Quechua), bilingual education might become more attractive to local communities as a more effective instructional approach for their children than monolingual Spanish education. The great virtue of Hornberger's study is that the schools are consistently viewed in the cultural context within which they operate. Only this kind of culture-sensitive review of the Kinsachata experience could have made sense of a situation in which instruction in Quechua produced objectively more successful primary education for the children but was discontinued at the wish of the parents, who, though valuing Quechua deeply, took the mission of the school to be the teaching of Spanish. Anyone involved in bilingual education or in language planning generally would be well advised to read this book carefully, both for its demonstration of the critical role of cultural context in the success or failure of bilingual education programs and for its demonstration of the sort of ethnographically informed research approach that is required in order to grasp the many facets of any particular cultural context. Departments of German and Anthropology[Received 18 January 1991.] Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr. PA 19010 Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, 6.) By Deborah Tannen. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. x, 240. Cloth $49.50, paper $14.95. Reviewed by Ronald K. S. Macaulay, Pitzer College 342LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) The present volume brings together much of Tannen's recent thinking on the topic of similarities between everyday speech and literature: 'The central idea of this book is that ordinary conversation is made up of linguistic strategies that have been thought quintessentially literary' (1). The introduction (1-8) sets out the assumptions underlying T's approach. Ch. 2, 'Involvement in discourse' (9-35), discusses T's use of the concept 'involvement', which she takes over and develops from Gumperz 1982. Ch. 3, 'Repetition in conversation: Toward a poetics of talk' (36-97) deals with repetition in conversation. Ch. 4, '"Oh talking voice that is so sweet": Constructing dialogue in conversation' (98133 ), discusses directly-quoted speech, and Ch. 5, 'Imagining worlds: Imagery and detail in conversation and other genres' (134-66), examines imagery and detail. Chs. 3-5 form the core of the book. Ch. 6, 'Involvement strategies in consort: Literary nonfiction and political oratory' (167-95), examines Mary Catherine Bateson's 'personal' account of a conference (Bateson 1972) and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. An Afterword, 'Toward a humanistic linguistics' (196-97), argues for a humanistic approach to linguistic analysis. Two appendices (198-204) list the sources of examples and the transcription...