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This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological 'complexity' and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of morphological complexity. This may partly reflect the influence of key social characteristics of communities on the typological nature of languages. Although many deaf communities are relatively small and may involve dense social networks (both social characteristics that Trudgill claimed may lend themselves to morphological 'complexification'), the picture is complicated by the highly variable nature of the sign language acquisition for most deaf people, and the ongoing contact between native signers, hearing non-native signers, and those deaf individuals who only acquire sign languages in later childhood and early adulthood. These are all factors that may work against the emergence of morphological complexification. The relationship between linguistic typology and these key social factors may lead to a better understanding of the nature of sign language grammar. This perspective stands in contrast to other work where sign languages are sometimes presented as having complex morphology despite being young languages (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2005); in some descriptions, the social determinants of morphological complexity have not received much attention, nor has the notion of complexity itself been specifically explored.

The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly”. The aim of this paper is to take a user-perspective and report on how participants in everyday conversations in the UK and Italy talk about irony and sarcasm and what kinds of authentic behaviors are described using these labels. These findings are discussed with reference to the academic concepts of irony and sarcasm to investigate how the lay and academic perspectives relate.

This paper presents methodology for an integrated treatment of three variable phenomena in Brazilian portuguese: (i) encoding of first-person plural into the forms nos (we) and a gente (the people), (ii) verbal agreement with the pronoun nos and (iii) verbal agreement with the pronominal form a gente. Based on the theoretical framework provided by Labovian sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1966, 1972), the methodology is applied to a sample of Brazilian portuguese spoken in the countryside of Sao Paulo State (GONCALVES, 2007). The results indicate that distinct factors predominate in the choice of the alternative forms of each phenomenon: in the verbal agreement with a gente, linguistic factors are the most prominent; in the verbal agreement with nos, social factors are the most salient; and in the use of nos/a gente both linguistic and social factors prevail.

This paper is about 'conversations' and 'texts'. I am going to define these two terms in a fairly pragmatic fashion. By 'conversations' I mean those things studied by conversation analysts. I am tempted to define 'texts' as those things not studied by conversation analysts. But that seems a little too inclusive. So, for my present purposes, a text is either a written statement (e.g. a letter) or an extended spoken statement (e.g. a lecture), many of which take the form of 'readings' of a prepared written statement. In part, then, the underlying inter? est is in the relationship between spoken and written discourse. One way of approaching the analysis of written texts is to examine how far they rely upon interpretative forms which have been shown to be characteristic of spoken discourse. This approach to textual analysis has recently been recom? mended by Atkinson, who proposes 'that an adequate understanding of how texts are produced and responded to may remain elusive so long as the issue is pursued without making close comparative reference to how talk works' (1983: 230). My aim is to illustrate the fruitfulness of this approach (see also, Mulkay, 1985b). First of all, I will show that Pomerantz's (1984a) findings on agreement and disagreement in conversations are equally applicable to a set of letters in which a group of scientists carry out a technical debate. Secondly, and perhaps more unexpectedly, I will show that Pomerantz's (1978) findings on responses to compliments help to reveal the basic structure of Nobel ceremo? nies.