In this chapter, examples from classroom interaction are presented to illustrate how languagefunctions in and is influenced by the sociocultural setting of the EFL classroom. The chapterfeatures two distinct focal points: First, the predominant use of English by the teacher and theminimal use of English by the students are proposed as instrumental activities where English canbe considered a mediating semiotic tool. I suggest that English-language interaction in the EFLclassroom represents Vygotsky‘s concept of a social semiotic tool that is specifically related to aninstitutional context (Wertsch 1998). Conversely, the second focus of the chapter is on theinverse use of Swedish, which mainly features as the students‘ language of social speech and theteacher‘s language of regulatory, disciplinary discourse. The teacher‘s code choice and theestablished practice of code-switching thus serve to redirect the students‘ focus, either toengaging in the learning of English, or to behaving according to the institutional context.

Who’s Swearing Now? represents an investigation of how people actually swear, illustrated by a collection of over 500 spontaneous swearing utterances along with their social and linguistic contexts. The book features a focus on the use of eight swear words: ass, bitch, cunt, damn, dick, fuck, hell, shit and their possible inflections or derivations, e.g., asshole or motherfucker, offering a solution to the controversial issue of defining swear words and swearing by limiting the investigation to the core set of words most common to previous swearing studies. The specific focus results in accurate depictions of contextualized swearing utterances. Precise frequency counts are thus enabled which, along with offensiveness ratings of contextualized and non-contextualized swearing, enable a clarification of The Swearing Paradox, referring to the phenomenon of frequently used swear words also being those which traditionally are judged to be the most offensive.

The book revisits the relationship between gender and swear word usage, but considers the distribution based on the core subset of swear words, revealing similarities where others have claimed differences. Significantly, Who’s Swearing Now? considers the aspect of race with regards to swear word usage, and reveals behavioral differences between, for example, White and African American males and females with regards to word preferences as well as social impetuses for and effects of swearing. Questionnaire and interview data supplement the swearing utterances, revealing participants’ individual credos about their own use or non-use of swear words and, interestingly, about others’ allowed or ideally prohibited use of swear words. These sets of data present thought-provoking and often entertaining statements regarding the unwritten set of rules governing swearing behavior. Who’s Swearing Now? concludes with close analyses of four recent and highly publicized incidences of public swear word usage, considered in light of the spontaneous swearing utterances, speaker and addressee variables such as gender, race and age, and perceptions of offensiveness and propriety.

Literary representations of orphanhood immediately activate the question of community through kinship and relation. In simple terms, "orphan" is unthinkable without its opposite family or kin. The language of orphanhood and family has been central to the study of national American literature, but recently indigenous notions of "kinship" have been proposed as key critical tools for examining Native American literature. In readings of Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes (1999), I find that attentiveness to kinship focuses inquiry squarely on literary responses to the historical disruption of Native kinship networks, broadly conceived, but also to the state's creation of Indian "orphans" through various forms of child removal. These works employ the motif of the Indian orphan's return to place Native thought and culture in critical relation to Euro-American social, ethical, and environmental practices. While previous scholarship has examined the critiques of Western, colonial cultures in the works of Hogan and Silko, the importance of the orphan figure to these projects has been largely overlooked. The literary orphan, I propose, is a particularly complex site in contemporary Native fiction for narrative interrogations of the limits and possibilities for community.

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term emigres of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to what extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system, on the one hand, or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited by a film retelling task from German emigres in Canada (n = 52) and the Netherlands (n = 50) and from Dutch emigres in Canada (n = 45) to retellings produced by predominantly monolingual control groups in Germany (n = 53) and the Netherlands (n = 45). Findings show that the attriting groups overuse empty pauses, repetitions, and retractions, whereas the distribution of filled pauses appears to conform more closely to the second language norm. An investigation of the location at which disfluency markers appear within the sentence suggests that they are indicators of difficulties that the attriters experience largely in the context of lexical retrieval.

Shining a light on responsive and responsible reading practices, postcolonial forms of magic realism, democratic epistemology, demonized others, the others of the others, critical insiders and subaltern voices, metonymic cross-writing and cultural criss-crossings, papers in this anthology engage with issues of empowerment and disempowerment, tensions between modernity and tradition and ideas of development and progress as connected to understandings of race, gender, caste, subalternity, and religion.

The present paper is a corpus-based study which examines social roles as constructed in British nineteenth-century children's literature. Both gender roles overall as well as the more specific roles of mother and father are investigated. The main approach is to systematically study adjectival descriptions of characters both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to find recurring patterns of description that function as part of defining a social role. The method of classification is primarily through semantic domains. The study shows that the female social role is defined as involving few mental qualities, whereas a pleasant appearance is important. In contrast, social status and positive mental characteristics are important defining factors for the male social role.