http://hdl.handle.net/10027/7834 Sun, 19 May 2013 10:35:29 GMT 2013-05-19T10:35:29Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/8723 Growing up and apart: Gender divergences in a Chicagoland elementary school Cameron, Richard A characteristic of children’s social orders is gender segregation. When children can choose, girls play more with girls and boys with boys. This begins around age three and peaks in later childhood. If children separate into same-gender groups, their interactions across the gender line will not be as frequent as those with members of the same sex. Following on Bloomfield’s assertion (1933:46) that “density of communication” results in the “most important differences of speech” within a community, I predict that differences will increasingly emerge between girls and boys. I test this using two sociolinguistic variables, (dh) and (ing), in the English spoken by children in an elementary school. The prediction is supported. Results contribute to research into language socialization and the acquisition of gendered linguistic expression. This is a copy of an article published in the Language Variation and Change © 2010 Cambridge University Press. The original article is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7921589 DOI: 10.1017/S0954394510000074 Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/8723 2010-01-01T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/8205 Constraint Reality: Linguistic Expressions of Restrictivity and Emotive Stances. A Discourse-Pragmatic Study of Utterance-Final Lāh in Shishan (Hainan Island, China) Xiang, Xuehua Based on natural conversational data, the current study analyzes utterance-final pragmatic particle lāh in Shishan, a dialect of Lingao of the Tai-Kadai language family. The research proposes that lāh signals an interactively built, relational notion of restrictivity. Specifically, lāh signals to the addressee that the state-of-affairs described in the utterance is restricted such that "nothing else" is possible due to a pre-existing, external constraint. The core meaning of relational "nothing else" gives rise to such pragmatic extensions as marking suggestions necessitated by external circumstances, assertion of "obviousness", negative politeness strategies, and various emotive stances toward the situation in focus and/or toward the addressee. The range of functions of lāh parallel a number of Southeast Asian languages' pragmatic particles (e.g. Cantonese lo, Mandarin me, Singapore English lor), particularly surrounding the function of marking the propositional content as "obvious". The overlap corroborates a recurrent theme in the expanding research on pragmatic particles, specifically, pragmatic particles' encoding the speaker's subjectivity toward the content being communicated. Equally important is that their use is prompted by, and in turn, responds to, perceived sharedness/divergence in the speaker's and addressee's subjective understandings of the world, an embodiment of the "intersubjective" nature of language. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Lingua. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Lingua, Vol 121, Issue 8, (June 2011). DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2011.03.002. The original publication is available at www.elsevier.com. Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/8205 2011-06-01T05:00:00Z