Contents -- CHAPTER 1 Discourse, Society, and the Individual -- Aaahh... -- The Physical Voice -- Linguistics and the Individual -- Discourse Analysis -- CHAPTER 2 Resources and Reasons for Individual Style -- Two Stories -- Creating a Context -- Narrating -- Moving In and Out of the Narrative -- Marking Key Points -- Reasons for Variation -- Narrative and Individuation -- CHAPTER 3 Individual Voice and Articulate Speaking -- Articulateness and Self-Expression -- Two Articulate Voices -- Readiness -- Clarity -- Effectiveness -- Two Self-Portraits -- Loci for the Expression of Self in Academic English -- Social Identity, Rhetorical Adaptation, and Personal Style -- CHAPTER 4 Individual Variation in Scripted Talk -- The Texas Poll -- Individual Variation Among the Respondents -- Justifications of Answers -- Answers to an Open-Ended Question -- Answers to a Multiple-Choice Question -- What Were the Respondents Doing? -- Individual Variation Among the Interviewers -- Unsolicited Comments on Answers -- Introductions -- What Were the Interviewers Doing? -- Politeness in Scripted Talk -- Discourse Task Management -- Cultural Individualism and Linguistic Individuation -- CHAPTER 5 Consistency and Individual Style -- The Barbara Jordan Style -- The Texts: Two Case Studies -- Linguistic Correlates of Personal Authority -- Barbara Jordan: Speaking Consistently from Moral Authority -- Sunny Nash: Inconsistency and Pragmatic Flexibility -- Strategies for Personal Style -- CHAPTER 6 Idiosyncracy and Its Interpretation -- Discourse Markers and Conventional Interpretations -- Strategies for Discourse Marking -- So: Conventional Marking and Interpretation -- One time in particular: Semiconventional Marking, Semantic Inference -- And uh, uh: Nonconventional, Uninferable Marking -- Repetition and the Interpretation of Idiosyncracy.

Grammar, Convention, and Repetition -- CHAPTER 7 Toward a Linguistics of the Individual Speaker -- Language as Art -- Major Themes Reiterated -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.