This article analyses discourse arising in reading group discussions as an instance of a real-world literary reading practice; it arises from and reports on the AHRC-funded Discourse of Reading Groups project. This naturalistic, observational approach to literary reading is contrasted with experimental approaches. Excerpts from the total dataset in which the language of literary texts is discussed are here subjected to two forms of analysis: software-assisted qualitative analysis suggests that where participants appear to make reference to their subjective responses to texts, this often has the function of presenting evaluations of those texts in mitigated form; interactional sociolinguistic analysis shows the sequential emergence of ‘language’ as a discussion topic, how discussion of language is co-constructed between participants and how such literary activity is culturally, interactionally and interpersonally contingent. ‘Face’ emerges as a key explanatory concept in both analyses.

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Previous correlational studies have found no relationship between speaker height, weight and speaking fundamental frequency, although it has often been claimed that listeners can correctly identify the height, weight, and bodily build of speakers and that voice pitch is one of the cues used. In this study various social factors were controlled for, and contrasting samples of speech from each subject were analysed. Twelve men and 15 women, drawn from a socially homogeneous group, were asked to read two passages and to phonate the vowel /a:/ at "their lowest attainable pitch." The median speaking fundamental frequency from both passages was calculated and a measure of basal F0 was obtained from the phonation of /a:/. In contrast to other studies, a relationship was found between speaker height and median speaking fundamental frequency, but no relationship was found between speaker weight and F0. The correlation between median speaking fundamental frequency and height was significant only in the male sample and in one passage. Physical and social interpretations for these findings are discussed.

This article first discusses ‘the reader’ as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literature.

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