Preference is treated as a single concept in conversation analysis, but it has in fact developed into an assemblage of loosely related concepts. It has also been construed in a variety of mutually incompatible, and sometimes meth-odologically questionable, ways. This is due, at least in part, to a confusion between preference in its everyday usage and preference as a technical notion. This paper attempts to present a clear and unitary concept of preference and investigate the properties of that concept, differentiate related concepts (including conversational implicature), and reveal common confusions. (Conversation analysis, preference, methodology, implicature)

Detailed participant observation among Detroit area adolescents provides explanations for the mechanisms of the spread of sound change outward from urban areas and upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy. The use of local phonological variables in adolescence is determined by a social structure within the age cohort, dominated by two opposed, and frequently polarized, school-based social categories. These categories, called “Jocks” and “Burnouts” in the school under study, embody middle-class and working-class cultures respectively, and articulate adolescent social structure with adult socioeconomic class. Differences between Jock and Burnout cultures entail differences in social network structure and in orientation to the urban area, and hence to urban sound changes. Parents' socioeconomic class is related to, but does not determine, category affiliation, and while category affiliation is a significant predictor in phonological variation, parents' socioeconomic class is not. (Variation, sound change, adolescents, urban dialects, suburban dialects, schools)

Work in the ethnography of communication has barely begun to look at writing, despite the fact that the status of writing bas recently preoccupied much of literary theory. The search to locate how writing functions among a culture's communicative practices can involve identifying domains that are unique to it, for example, where some kinds of writing attain a standing such that they are not meant to be understood as the transcription of a testimony or other oral act. Such a possibility is part of our culture but not part of many others, and is, among other things, a significant cognitive development. This article takes a diachronic perspective, back to a moment in our own past when a certain class of writings began to demand a kind of understanding different from that demanded by writing in that culture up to that time. I look at the Middle Ages to examine, inter alia, the written document putting into question prevailing temporal indices; the move of the act of writing away from an identification with other constatable acts and toward a more oblique and less committed relation to those acts; biblical exegesis as elaborating a new stance of writing through its practice of written gloss; the teaching of writing skills and the professionalization of the writer; and the significance of a renewed use of the cursive hand. The changing status of writing both encouraged and is implicated in the appearance and legitimizing of a set of utterances (and the acts behind them) seen as beneficially unmoored rather than moored, in a space and time of their own. (Ethnography of communication, grammatology, medieval studies, writing)

An attempt is made at defining the phenomenon of Indoubil. Its origin, use, and function are discussed. Indoubil, the language of Bukavu's [Zaire] younger generation, would seem to serve a number of purposes. It is argued that Indoubil functions not only as a means of identification for a particular age group but that in a variety of contexts it is also used to neutralize the illeffects of ethnicity. (Ethnicity, melting pot, lingua franca, Swahili)

Numbers are used for exact and approximative estimations. The numbers used in approximative expressions are typically so-called round numbers, such as 10, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 100, 1,000, and such numbers are also very frequent in texts. This article presents evidence that some numbers are rounder than others and discusses how the roundness of a number can be derived from its contents of the base number of the numeral System of the culture. A formula for deriving the roundness of a number is suggested, and some evidence that intuitions about roundness vary between vigesimal and decimal cultures as predicted by the formula is given. (Number, numeral, decimal, vigesimal, money, anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and culture, English, French, Swedish)