This study describes a series of evaluations of gender pairs of New Zealand English, Australian English, American English and RP-type English English voices by over 400 students in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S.A. Voices were chosen to represent the middle range of each accent, and balanced for paralinguistic features. Twenty-two personality and demographic traits were evaluated by Likert-scale questionnaires. Results indicated that the American female voice was rated most favourably on at least some traits by students of all three nationalities, followed by the American male. For most traits, Australian students generally ranked their own accents in third or fourth place, but New Zealanders put the female NZE voice in the mid-low range of all but solidarityassociated traits. All three groups disliked the NZE male. The RP voices did not receive the higher rankings in power/status variables we expected. The New Zealand evaluations downgrade their own accent vis-a Á-vis the American and to some extent the RP voices. Overall, the American accent seems well on the way to equalling or even replacing RP as the prestige ± or at least preferred ± variety, not only in New Zealand but in Australia and some non-English-speaking nations as well. Preliminary analysis of data from Europe suggests this manifestation of linguistic hegemony as`Pax Americana' seems to be prevalent over more than just the Anglophone nations.As hypothesized, speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents' own accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. . . . These results underline the prevailing status of British RP throughout the Anglophone world and even in a society that possesses economic and political advantages over Britain internationally. (Stewart, Ryan and Giles 1985: 103) ACCENT EVALUATIONS IN AUSTRALASIA AND THE U.S.A.

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This research was motivated by the need to develop positive feminist discourses about women who are infertile and who pursue medical interventions to achieve motherhood. This study analysed how 19 women who wanted children but who could not easily have them constructed their desire for children, motherhood and their infertility. Reasons for wanting children included motherhood as ‘natural instinct’, as ‘a stage in the development of a relationship’ and as ‘social expectation’. These were used to construct motherhood as physical, psychological and social completeness and fulfilment for women. Consequently, infertility was experienced as guilt, inadequacy and failure, reinforced by the language used to describe infertility. Women also discussed their desire for children in terms of reproductive decision-making, emphasizing notions of agency, becoming a parent as a stage in a relationship and infertility as a disruption of life plans. Our analysis argues for a broader definition of motherhood and a wider variety of culturally sanctioned roles for women.

A B S T R AC T This article explores the contributions that five different approaches to discourse analysis can make to interpreting and understanding the same piece of data. Conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology are the approaches chosen for comparison. The data is a nine-minute audio recording of a spontaneous workplace interaction. The analyses are compared, and the theoretical and methodological implications of the different approaches are discussed.K E Y W O R D S : conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, discourse analysis, discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, pragmatics, workplace interaction Any newcomer to the study of conversation or language in use will be bewildered by the array of analytic approaches that exists. Even more seasoned researchers might be challenged to provide comprehensive descriptions of the range of discourse analytic approaches available in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. These include pragmatics, speech act theory, variation analysis, communication accommodation theory, systemic-functional linguistics, semiotics, proxemics, and various types of rhetorical, stylistic, semantic and narrative analysis. A recent interdisciplinary textbook (Titscher et al., 2000), for example, surveys 12 different approaches to discourse analysis, and even then three of the five approaches adopted in this article are not included. These five approaches to the analysis of spoken interaction will be well known to readers of journals such as this one, but we make no claims for comprehensiveness here. Rather, our aim in this article is to explore the different facets of one particular spoken interaction by providing a detailed discourse analysis of its features from five different analytical perspectives.

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