|
|
Conference Schedule
| FRIDAY |
| 9:30-10:30 |
Registration (UMC
382) |
| 10:30
–
12:00 |
Workshop: Mary
Bucholtz (UMC 382) |
Workshop: Crispin
Thurlow (UMC 386) |
| 12:00 -
1:15 |
Break for lunch |
| 1:15 -
2:45 |
Workshop: Norma Mendoza-Denton (UMC
382) |
Workshop: Karen Tracy (UMC 386) |
| 3:00 -
5:30 |
Movie screening
and discussion (UMC 382) |
| 6:00 PM |
Social event TBA |
|
| SATURDAY |
| 8:15
AM |
Registration (Hale
2nd Floor) |
| 8:40
–
9:00 |
Opening Remarks
(Hale 230) |
| 9:00
–
9:50 |
Plenary Talk: Crispin Thurlow (Hale 230) |
|
|
| 11:30 - 12:45 |
Break for
lunch |
|
|
| 2:15-2:30 |
Snacks and coffee |
|
|
| 4:00
– 4:50 |
Plenary
Talk:
Mary Bucholtz (UMC 230) |
| 5:00 – 7:00 |
Conference
Reception (Old Main) |
|
| SUNDAY |
| 8:15
AM |
Registration
(Hale 2nd Floor) |
| 9:00 – 9:50 |
Plenary
Talk:
Norma Mendoza-Denton (Hale 230) |
|
|
| 11:30
–
12:45 |
Break
for
lunch |
Panel
Descriptions
Theories and Frameworks:
theoretical approaches to interdisciplinarity
Identity: a panel on aspects
of
language, discourse, and identity
Legitimation: a panel on
legitimation in political discourse
Ideologies: a panel on
language
attitudes, perceptions, and ideologies
Gender/Sexuality: a panel on
issues in language, gender, and sexuality
Applications and Discussions:
applied approaches to interdisciplinarity
Internets: a panel on
computer-mediated discourse and interaction
Globalization: a panel on
language
on the global scale
Pragmatics: a panel on
discourse
pragmatics and politeness
Ethnicity: a panel on
language, discourse, ethnicity, and positioning
Paper
Abstracts
Theories and Frameworks
Csilla
Wegner, Intertextuality
as
interdisciplinary link
The notion that our utterances are not on-the-spot creations of an
individual mind but echo and affect others’ words has
occupied scholars
in many different approaches to the study of discourse. While the basic
Bakhtinian idea about the dialogicality of language remains more or
less unchanged, intertextuality as a concept has manifested itself in
empirical research in quite diverse ways. Within variationist
sociolinguistics, Schilling-Estes (2004) has shown how the presence of
others’ words and voices in informants’ talk during
sociolinguistic
interviews impacts speakers’ production of target variables.
In
interactional analyses, intertextuality is often investigated as
repetition with attention to its stylistic or functional aspects
(Tannen 1989). Critical discourse analysts are interested in
interdiscursivity as a way to describe the disembedding and mixing of
genres in late modernity (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999).
Linguistic anthropologists have long engaged the idea of
intertextuality or more recently, interdiscursivity, to study discourse
as “processual, real-time, event-bound social
action” (Silverstein
2005: 7).
In this paper, I review how intertextuality has been used
within variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, critical
discourse analysis and linguistic anthropological research in order to
discuss its potential as a cross-disciplinary unifying concept. The
discussion will center on definitions and empirical examinations of
intertextuality within each of these areas and will be geared toward
identifying points of conceptual convergence. I argue that diverse
approaches to the socio-cultural study of language can benefit from
exploring intertextuality/interdiscursivity as a mutual research
agenda. In particular, I discuss three interrelated areas where such
cross-disciplinary research focus may result in significant theoretical
advances: 1) an understanding of language use as encompassing both
routine and creative acts; 2) a move away from a static conception of
discourse as product toward a processual understanding of language as
sociocultural practice; 3) recasting the micro-macro dilemma into a
more dynamic framework that pushes the inherent temporality of social
interaction into the foreground.
Pat
Mayes, The Use of
Multiple
Methods in Reflexive Analysis: An Example of Critiquing the Critical
My goal in this analysis is to demonstrate the usefulness of
combining an ethnographic approach with Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA) and in the process provide a reflexive critique of the
application of critical theory in a particular institutional context.
Using data collected in a one-semester, ethnographic study of two
English composition courses enabled me to critique the application of
critical theory by analyzing both the institutional context and
micro-level interactions.
Critical theories were developed by sociologists in the
Frankfurt School and were intended to expose class structure and other
unequal power relations. In education, an applied version of critical
theory called “critical pedagogy” was created in
order to change the
traditional power relations between teacher and student. In this study,
I investigate how one such critical pedagogy curriculum was implemented
in an English composition program. In this context,
“critical” was
supposed to mean that teachers would downplay their authority by
refraining from directive practices and encourage students to actively
participate in their learning. However, institutionalized practices
conflicted with these purported goals. For example, there was a set of
“portfolio assessment goals,” used in the final
evaluation of student
writing, which took on great significance throughout the semester, even
to the point of being used as instructional material. Indeed, these
goals were treated as though they were the students’ goals,
despite the
fact that students were supposed to be producing their own goals. These
institutionalized goals had a pervasive effect on instructional
practices, which can be seen even at the level of individual
interactions. For instance, although teachers were supposed to refrain
from directive practices, the example below shows the teacher (Alicia)
acting as the traditional, directive teacher, even using a direct
directive (line 7).
1. Wendy: so=,
2. instead of using my=?
3. ... (.7) definition?
4. Alicia: you can use yours but,
5. but still,
6. you know?
7. ... (.7) you should have a definition from the text
that shows that.
8. .. you’re not lying.
Alicia
also invokes authority when she explains that the reason Wendy should
accept her advice is to prove that she is “not
lying.” This suggests
that Wendy’s words are not adequate, again despite the ideal
of active
student participation. The link between this micro-level interaction
and macro-level institutionalized practices is apparent when we
understand that Alicia’s directive invokes the following
portfolio
assessment goal: “Incorporate the ideas of others accurately
and fairly
through summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation.”
Although all analyses are necessarily incomplete and subject to
some degree of researcher bias, the use of multiple methods may
mitigate these issues to a certain extent. More specifically, the use
of an ethnographic approach and CDA allows the researcher to
investigate factors that affect power relations at both the macro and
micro levels, thus providing multiple perspectives for understanding
this complex phenomenon. This is particularly useful when attempting a
reflexive critique such as the one exemplified here, which may be even
more vulnerable to the “blind-spots” of
one’s own biases.
TBA
Identity
Valerie
Sultan, Doing
Deafness:
Indexing One’s Deaf Identity Through the Categorization of
Others
It was not until the insight of Dr. William Stokoe, Jr. in 1960
that American Sign Language (ASL) began to be recognized as a language
in its own right. This recognition made it possible for the eventual
realization of the existence of Deaf culture. The late recognition of
the language and culture of Deaf people evidences their markedness, and
like other marked groups, Deaf people have to contend with a world that
operates on notions of normativity, especially with respect to talk.
However, such normative talk often acts as a catalyst for a
counter-talk by members of the marked group in which difference is used
to create a distinct sociolinguistic world. The current paper examines
such talk in the Deaf community by analyzing the ASL discursive
practice of noting a third person referent’s DEAFness.
Due to the saliency of the division Deaf/Hearing in the Deaf world, it
is frequently the case that when third person referents are brought up
in conversation, their Deaf/hearing status will either be mentioned by
or requested from the speaker. Often the relevance of the
referent’s
status to the content of the talk is uncertain at best. The example
below demonstrates such a case.
20 sue: SEE FOR ALMOST TWO YEAR
(I haven’t) seen (her) for almost two years
21 MAE: REALLY
Really?
22 SUE: LAST
(The) last (time)
23 poss.1 WEDDING
(was at) my wedding
24 pro.3 --
She --
? 25 poss.3 PARTNER HEARING INTERPRETER
Her partner (is a) hearing interpreter
In this example HEARING directly precedes INTERPRETER, modifying it.
But the characteristic “hearing” is an assumed
semantic feature of
“interpreter” in the Deaf community, making the
mention of HEARING
redundant in this case. Therefore there may be another motivation for
the mention, and this motivation can be determined by looking at what
it follows. The third person referent in line 20 is Sue’s
friend and is
known to be Deaf by both Mae and Sue. This knowledge is key because if
Sue wants to discuss that her friend’s partner is an
interpreter, then
she must deal with the fact that Mae’s cultural knowledge
about Deaf
relationships (i.e. that they are mostly Deaf-Deaf) will cause Mae to
presume that the partner is also Deaf. Therefore, it is necessary to
give background information in order to ensure that potential confusion
does not cause a bump in the smooth progress of the conversation, and
one means by which this confusion can be avoided is by first stating
that the partner is hearing and then stating that she is an
interpreter. The fact that Sue recognizes the potential confusion and
the assumptions that underlie it and then moves to circumvent it
indexes both her and Mae’s membership in the Deaf community.
The above example demonstrates that Deaf people use particular
linguistic devices to index their and their interlocutor’s
Deaf
identity. Such work supports current theories on identity by pointing
to the intersubjective, emergent nature of Deaf identity through the
creating and reinforcement of a Deaf-normative sociolinguistic world.
Kara
Becker, /r/, Place, and
Identity in New York City's Lower East Side
This study works within a social-constructionist framework to argue
that, through language, speakers construct a place identity, one of
many facets of identity that is emergent-in-interaction. Data on the
use of /r/ by white ethnic speakers of New York City English (NYCE) on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan are used to describe variation in
interaction. In this case, speakers’ use of /r/ varies by
topic,
reflecting a strong place identity oriented to the Lower East Side.
As a neighborhood, the Lower East Side is characterized by rapid social
change, a community context that directly affects its
residents’
identities. From its early days as a way station for European
immigrants, to its decline in the last half of the 20th century, to
more recent gentrification of private and public space, the Lower East
Side is often characterized as a “struggle over
space,”(Mele, 2000).
The speakers in this study represent a declining minority of white
ethnics who have lived on one block their whole lives, watching the
landscape of the neighborhood change. These speakers’ unique
placement
in a neighborhood engrossed in social conflict triggers place identity
to become salient through talk. The residents’ identities are
not
wholly subject to notions of place – at the same time they
are
constructing a place identity, they are certainly constructing and
reinforcing other aspects of identity, including gender,
race/ethnicity, class, and age. What I hope to do here is add to our
understanding of identity as multivalent (Mendoza-Denton, 2002) by
highlighting one source of identity construction: the indexing of
place.
In particular, the speakers on the Lower East Side use /r/ as a marker
of place identity. When talking about the neighborhood, speakers use
significantly more /r/ than when discussing other topics. The analysis
follows Schilling-Estes (2004), in describing variation in the
micro-setting of interaction, or what Mendoza-Denton (2002) calls
practice-based variation. The theoretical basis for a study of this
type is two-part – first, that identity is
emergent-in-interaction, and
second, that variation is a resource for the construction of identity.
Many studies have looked at how language and identity emerge in
interaction through the use of discourse (de Fina, Schiffrin, &
Bamberg, 2006; Gumperz, 1982; Johnstone, 1990; Modan, 2007; Rampton,
1999; Schiffrin, 1994). My goal here is to integrate variation,
discourse, and ethnography as a means for analyzing the construction of
place identity by NYCE speakers.
Lori
Donath, Nerds in
Nerdland:
The Discursive Emergence of Identity and the Transition into an
Engineering Community of Practice
Grounded in the linguistic community of practice and sociocultural
linguistic frameworks, the study investigates the process of
socialization to professional engineering identity. The study is set in
the Research Communications Studio (RCS), an NSF-supported project at
the University of South Carolina comprised of structured small-group
meetings among undergraduate engineering researchers. Through informal
discussion of students' oral and written formal communications, the RCS
offered resources for learning and professionalization to a subset of
the elite undergraduate engineering researcher population.
This research takes up the question: What possible constructions of
professional engineering identity exist in the RCS--whose participants'
view communication as a tool for learning and career advancement, if
not social mobility through the professional presentation of self--in
terms of class, ethnicity, and gender, and in the context of
socialization to an elite social positioning?
I adopt a qualitative approach to the data, employing three years of
participant observation and tools such as surveys, writing prompts,
and, principally, discourse and conversation analytic approaches. I
attend to the ways participants employ floor management, narrative, and
other discourse strategies to co-construct various memberships; they
forge alignments of identity through clusters of strategies, for
example, through simultaneous speech and joint constructions, synchrony
of gesture and reported dialogue, and personal/professional narratives
and second story sequences (Goodwin and Heritage 1990).
I analyze participants' ambiguous evaluations and co-constructions of
engineering identity as they transition to engineering communit(ies) of
practice, and, in so doing I explore how various emergent formations of
engineering identity cross-cut the "unofficial" (O'Connor 2003) social
alignments that participants co-construct in the RCS. These unofficial
alignments, which key to global ideologies such as class, complicate
participants' socialization to professional vision (Goodwin 1994) and
manifest in their ambivalence about moving toward a professional
identity as engineers.
In the first of the two excerpts to be presented, the participants
construct their engineering membership within the sphere of popular
discourse about nerds. In a second excerpt the participants negotiate
the tension between engineer as practitioner and engineer as
researcher, as well as the transition from the former to the latter.
Particularly in this second excerpt, participants’
co-construction of
different constellations of engineering identities correspond to
practices that secondarily index socio-economic class, gender and other
social identities. Valuation of engineering practices and identities is
ordered in terms of macro political-economic norms.
Whereas previous research in sociolinguistics has focused on
counter-cultural membership, and work in linguistic anthropology has
focused on deficit among members of disadvantaged groups, who are at
the losing end of differential access to cultural capital. Instead,
this work begins at the opposite end of social stratification, asking
how relatively socially privileged students discursively socialize one
another to professional engineering identity. The work also provides a
counterpart to previous research on nerds (Bucholtz 1999, Bucholtz
2001, Bucholtz 2002) but takes up investigation in a new context: nerds
"on their own turf".
Legitimation
Thomas
Mitchell, "A
legitimate
insistence": "External"
explanations and "internal" strategies of legitimation in the US
Official English controversy
In July 2005, a US House of Representatives Subcommittee heard
arguments for and against federal legislation that would make English
the official language of the United States. Iowa State Senator Paul
McKinley, who had recently been involved in Iowa’s Official
English
legislation, and Mauro Mujica, Chairman of the Board of US English,
Inc., gave arguments advocating the legislation. Raul Gonzalez, the
Legislative Director of the National Council of La Raza, and John
Trasvina, President of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education
Fund, presented arguments against it.
With Heller (1999), I am interested in the effects of discriminatory
attitudes and practices relating to minority languages. In order to see
how opposing arguments that claim to have the best interests of
minority language speakers in mind play out, this paper analyzes the
ways in which participants in the discourse are both legitimated and
seek to legitimate themselves and their positions on the issue. I argue
that the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his concepts of
habitus, field, and symbolic power, have great explanatory value in
understanding what is at stake in these hearings and the factors
external to the discourse that serve to legitimate the words of the
speakers. However, as Hanks (2005: 78) notes, Bourdieu “is
usually
vague where a linguist needs specificity and often specific where
linguists do not tread”; as a result, his theory is
inadequate in
understanding the ways in which features that are internal to the
discourse serve to legitimate the speaker’s position and,
more
importantly, delegitmate that of their opponents. In order to account
for the speakers’ internal strategies, I use critical
discourse
analytical (CDA) techniques that I adapt from Martín Rojo
and van
Dijk’s (1997) application of a framework developed by van
Leeuwen
(2007). I examine subtle features of the speakers’ language
to reveal
their attempts to monopolize (1) social legitimacy, (2) the truth, and
(3) discourse (Martín Rojo and van Dijk 1997: 550) through
positive
ingroup and negative outgroup presentation using the strategies
(elaborated by van Leeuwen) of authorization, moral legitimation,
rationalization, and mythopoesis.
This paper shows how Bourdieu’s social theory can be
profitably
integrated with CDA research to supplement it by accounting for
legitimation that does not occur at the level internal to the
discourse. It demonstrates that legitimation is a strategy for
persuasion, not just for identity construction, and thus examines not
only how people do identity work, but also why they do so in a
particular situation.
Piotr
Cap, Proximization in
the
discourse of politics: legitimizing the "war-on-terror"
In this paper I argue that some of the best legitimization effects in
political discourse are accomplished through the use of what I term
‘proximization’. Proximization is a rhetorical
strategy that draws on
the spaker’s ability to present the events on the discourse
stage as
directly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or a
threatening way. In my approach, there are three aspects of
proximization. The spatial aspect involves the construal of events in
the discourse as physically endangering the addressee. The temporal
aspect involves presenting the events as momentous and historic and
thus of central significance to both the addressee and the speaker. The
axiological aspect involves a clash between the system of values
adhered to by the speaker and the addressee on the one hand, and, on
the other, the values characterizing the agent(s) whose actions make up
the (undesirable) events on the discourse stage. Although the
tripartite model of proximization is very complex when it comes to the
interplay of the three aspects and, importantly, the pragmalinguistic
input (i.e. assigning the concrete language constructs to each of the
three dimensions), its starting assumption is rather basic: the
(political) discourse addressee is more likely to legitimize the
‘pre-emptive’ actions aimed at neutralizing the
proximate ‘threat’ if
he/she construes it as personally consequential. I shall illustrate
this claim, as well as the more specific claims regarding the interplay
of spatial, temporal and axiological meanings, with samples of the US
rhetoric of the ‘war-on-terror.’
Adam
Hodges, The Dialogic
Emergence of "Truth" in Politics: Reproduction and Subversion of the
"War on Terror" Discourse
Truth claims in political discourse are implicated in a dialogic
process whereby political actors “assimilate, rework, and
re-accentuate” prior discourse (Bakhtin 1986:89). While
political
actors themselves may view truth as an object to be discovered, I argue
that analysts are best served by viewing truth as an emergent property
of this dialogic process. In this paper, I examine how intertextual
connections are integral to both the reproduction and subversion of
established truth claims (such as the claims that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction or that Iraq helped al-Qaeda
carry out the attacks of 9/11). My data draw from the first
presidential debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush in September
2004, an interview with Dick Cheney after the release of a preliminary
report by the 9/11 Commission in June 2004, and Joseph
Lowery’s speech
during the Coretta Scott King funeral in February 2006. My analysis
examines these data in light of the notions of speech chains (Agha
2003) and chains of authentication (Irvine 1989), as well as the role
of reported speech in connecting one discursive encounter with another
(cf. Voloshinov 1973).
As Bakhtin (1981) notes, discourse “cannot fail to be
oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the
‘already known,’ the ‘common
opinion’ and so forth” (279). In any
recontextualization of previous
discourse, social actors draw upon pre-existing indexical associations
between the intertext and prior contexts. One effect is that repetition
may take “what is imitated (repeated) seriously, claiming and
appropriating it without relativizing it” (Kristeva 1980:73).
In this
way, established truth claims are reaffirmed and gain further weight in
public debate. Another effect is that repetition may introduce
“a
signification opposed to that of the other’s word”
(ibid). Political
actors rely on this discursive move to challenge truth claims. Parody
figures into such challenges by working to subvert understandings
associated with previously uttered words and resignify their social
meaning. For example, in his speech at the Coretta Scott King funeral
in February 2006, Rev. Joseph Lowery reanimates a phrase
(“weapons of
mass destruction”) linked with the larger “Bush war
on terror
narrative” (Hodges 2007). His reiteration of this phrase,
along with
the subsequent play on those words (“weapons of
misdirection”), works
to undermine truth claims put forth by the Bush administration and
establish new social meanings for those words.
The analysis demonstrates that truth in political discourse
should not merely be analyzed as the individual style or intent of a
politician to persuade or deceive, but as the confluence of various
texts and discourses. Meaning and interpretation are always a function
of the “ways that the now-said reaches back to and somehow
incorporates
or resonates with the already-said and reaches ahead to, anticipates,
and somehow incorporates the to-be-said” (Bauman 2005:145;
cf. Bauman
and Briggs 1990). A focus on intertextuality allows the analyst to
connect language with the larger interpretive web in which it is
embedded and highlight the performative acts (Austin 1962) that bring
‘truth’ into existence.
Ideologies
Viviana
Quintero, “She
Speaks Like a Landowner!”: Metapragmatics, Language
Ideologies, and Gender in Northern Highland Ecuador
While engaging Quichua-Spanish bilinguals on their ways of speaking
Quichua in northern highland Ecuador, I came across a culturally
salient discourse of indirectness, politeness, and respect, voiced in
the metapragmatic command, Kingu, kingukuwan parlay (Speak with
zigzag). In this presentation, I first explore how indigenous
Quichua-Spanish speakers describe and understand the mediated content
and social distribution of this culturally salient ideology of
language. In tracking key indexical entailments and targets of this
language ideology in speakers’ metapragmatic framings and
other related
discursive practices, I find that many speakers believe that one can
best deploy this style of speaking only through Quichua, not Spanish.
Furthermore, speakers tend to typify older people and indigenous women
as the most natural and effective performers of this ideology and
practice. I then analyze how indigenous bilingual women construe,
evaluate, and regiment each others’ understandings and
performances of
this linguacultural ideology as they navigate through a continuously
evolving sociolinguistic and economically dynamic landscape. Finally, I
discuss some of the implications of these encounters and negotiations
for the kinds of bilingual subjectivities some of these women inhabit
and perform in daily life. Throughout this presentation, I demonstrate
how a semiotic analysis of speakers’ reflexive practices can
illuminate
not only indigenous women’s bilingual subjectivities, but
also their
positioned experiences and mediations of socioeconomic, cultural, and
linguistic shifts that have transpired in this region in the last
thirty years. The linguistic anthropological analysis presented here is
based on a corpus of audio recordings of semi-structured metapragmatic
narratives as well
Panayiotis
Pappas, Linguistic
stereotypes and the family: evidence from Modern Greek
As Hazen (2002) clearly demonstrates, sociolinguists have only
begun to explore the role of the family as a social unit in language
variation. One particular aspect that remains under-investigated, is
how linguistic stereotypes interact with family dynamics. In this
presentation I will compare the speech pattern and attitudes of members
of the same family with respect to a stigmatized variant of Modern
Greek. The particular pattern of variation under investigation concerns
the change of [lj] and [nj] into their alveolar equivalents ([l] and
[n]) in (C)Xi(C) syllables, which is taking place in a rural Greek
community due to contact with urban varieties and the negative
stereotype that has emerged towards the palatal variants in Greek
society in general. The dataset for this study was constructed from
speech samples obtained from 48 speakers during sociolinguistic
interviews, representing two genders, three generations, and two levels
of education (standard and advanced). A statistical analysis of the
data shows that this is a change in progress, as the youngest
generation has a mean percentage of 45% palatalization, while for the
oldest generation the mean percentage is 95%. Other significant factors
are sex, education, attitude towards the local community and awareness
about the variation.
The information gathered during the sociolinguistic interviews reveals
that the palatal variants are mostly stigmatized among young females.
Since there are several groups of family members (parents, children,
and even grandparents) among the participants, this case study allows
us to examine the function and significance of stereotypes within the
family. In particular I will be discussing the following questions:
Are all members of the family equally aware of the stereotype? The data
show that awareness of the stereotype develops in the youngest adults.
Are linguistic stereotypes transmitted through family ties?
The answer is yes, but the transmission occurs between siblings and not
between parents and children. In fact there are several cases in which
children are able to recognize the stigmatized variant in the speech
pattern of an older sibling, but not in that of a parent.
Is family or peer group a more important factor in determining
the speech pattern of a young adult? Despite Labov's (2001) observation
that men tend to adopt the speech pattern of their mothers, the
evidence from this study indicates that due to the stigma against
palatals, young males adopt the innovative alveolar variant.
Lauren
Hall-Lew & Nola
Stephens, Talkin'
Country: Locating an Ideological Speech Community
While the ideology of ‘country talk’ looms large in
the American
national identity, surprisingly little attention has been paid to its
production and perception as a linguistic variety. Unlike other salient
US English dialects, ‘country’ cannot be strictly
defined either as a
regional variety or as a way of speaking particular to all rural
lifestyles. What, then, is ‘country talk’? Where is
it located, and
what is its social meaning? This pilot study begins to address these
questions by collecting linguistic attitudes about
‘country’ held by
perhaps the most stereotypical ‘country’ talkers:
residents of
small-town Texas.
Our analysis is based on interviews conducted with 20 people
who have lived in northern Texas and/or southern Oklahoma for at least
most of their lifetime. The interviews consisted of 13 women and seven
men, ages 28 to 95 (mean = 47). Descriptions of ‘country
talk’ were
elicited by asking participants to perform an impression of
‘country’
or to imitate the speech of a person who they felt exemplified
‘country.’ All interviewees performed or mentioned
a very consistent
set of features that they felt represent ‘country
talk’. Phonological
features included monopthongized (ay), dipthongized lax vowels,
elongated tense vowels, and ‘g-droppin’ (production
of suffix -ing as
-in). Prosodic features included reduced pitch range, slow rate of
speech, and high amplitude. Nonstandard lexical stress, nonstandard
syntax, a special lexicon, and the topic/content of speech were also
consistently mentioned. The most frequently mentioned linguistic
variables were lexical: y’all (Tillery & Bailey 1998;
Tillery,
Wilke & Bailey 2000) and fixin’ to (Berstein 2003)
being the most
frequent. Interestingly, some lexical items that were attributed
specifically to ‘country’ are not unique to
Southern American English:
gonna, ain’t, and fixin’ (without to).
Each participant was asked their opinion about the speech
styles they associated with country, hick, redneck, hillbilly,
Southern, and rural. About 85% of interviewees felt that country was
linguistically identical to both hick and redneck. Those who thought
that there was a linguistic difference described hick and redneck as
being more grammatically nonstandard than country. All participants
found country to be linguistically different from hillbilly, from
Southern, and from rural. Most people described their own speech as
‘Southern’ but “melodically”
distinguishable from speech in ‘the Deep
South.’ For the ten women who were asked to describe
differences
between ‘country’ and ‘Southern
Bell,’ the main linguistic difference
was a raised pitch.
Interviewees were asked to circle areas on US and Texas maps
where they felt ‘country’ was spoken (cf. Preston
1986). Responses to
the US map varied greatly, while responses to the Texas map were rather
consistent: nearly all respondents circled their hometown area. Nine
participants explicitly stated that they speak
‘country.’ Although a
range of opinions was expressed concerning the linguistic, geographic
and social features that represent ‘country’,
almost all expressed a
shared identity with a community of ‘country’
talkers. In conclusion,
our analysis argues for an approach to linguistic identity that
necessarily locates the boundaries of a speech community within the
minds of its speakers.
Gender/Sexuality
Lal
Zimman, Revisiting the
closet:
Transgender narratives of identity, coming out and disclosure
While the coming out has been widely theorized and the coming out
narratives of gays and lesbians have attracted the attention of a
number of scholars, coming out as transgender and the narratives that
accompany this process remain understudied. As defined in the
literature, coming out as transgender is almost exclusively
characterized as the practice of revealing a gender identity which
– it
is left to be inferred – is not identifiable on the basis of
visual and
other gender cues, particularly those associated with the notion of
biological sex. While this process is indeed part of the experiences of
many transgender people, it leaves unrecognized the issue of disclosing
past experience in another gender role in those cases where an
individual's gender identity and perceived gender do match. After the
transgender community’s own usage, I refer to the latter
process as
disclosure.
Because of the immense diversity of the transgender
community, no single characterization of coming out as transgender will
suffice. Some individuals, whose transgender identity may be centered
around impermanent practices such as cross-dressing, experience coming
out primarily according to the model recognized in the literature; in
other words, they must come out as transgender in order to have their
gender recognized as something other (or more) than their apparent sex.
Other transpeople find a verbal act of coming out unnecessary, because
the combination of their gender expression and certain physical
characteristics which are indexical of “the other”
gender outs them on
a daily basis. Still others live invisibly as members of the gender
with which they identify; these individuals, whose invisibility has
often excluded them from the researcher’s gaze, demonstrate
the role of
disclosure in the negotiation of sharing transgender identity.
This paper contributes to academic work on coming out in two
ways: first, by exploring disclosure, I add a layer of complexity to
the notion of coming out and demonstrate that the queer community is
too diverse to be treated as a homogenous group whose experiences can
be assumed to mirror those of gays and lesbians, as some authors have
done. I support my claim that disclosure and coming out should be
viewed as discrete practices by drawing on the language used by
transgender speakers during interview sessions in which I collected
their coming out narratives. For example, the use of certain lexical
items like come out, disclose, the closet and stealth demonstrate
participants’ orientation to the distinct nature of coming
out on
either side of transition. Second, I consider these narratives in terms
of previous findings on the coming out narratives of gays and lesbians,
namely those published by A.C. Liang (1994, 1997) and Kathleen Wood
(1994, 1997, 1999). While my findings seem to support the validity of
observations made by Liang and Wood about the gays and lesbians with
whom they worked, they also demonstrate the incomplete nature of these
previous studies in characterizing the coming out narrative genre as a
whole.
Emek
Ergun, Alternative
Discursive
Constructions of Virginity among Lesbian and Bisexual Women
Women’s sexualities and bodies historically have been a
critical domain
of surveillance and control within patriarchal societies, where
compulsory heterosexuality defines women’s desires
exclusively in
phallocentric terms. Functioning as part of this male construction of
female sexualities, the ideology of virginity aims to confine
women’s
first sexual experiences to male-defined parameters. In this context,
lesbian and bisexual women’s sexual experiences with women
are often
not recognized as legitimate sex by the larger society and they are
labeled virgins as long as they do not let a man penetrate their
vaginas. However, with the rise of feminist and queer movements, the
dominant discourse on sexuality and virginity shaped by
heteronormativity has been challenged by alternative discourses created
especially by lesbian and bisexual women. By specifically investigating
such alternative discursive constructions of virginity, this study aims
to make lesbian and bisexual women’s sexual desires and
experiences
visible by highlighting their agency and resistance.
This exploratory study is based on semi-structured in-depth
interviews with two lesbian and two bisexual American women aged
between 21 and 26. All four interviews were tape-recorded and
transcribed fully. While the shortest interview lasted for forty
minutes, the longest one took ninety minutes. After transcribed, the
data collected through interviews are analyzed using primarily critical
discourse analysis and feminist discourse analysis frameworks.
The study attempts to answer two major research questions: 1)
How do lesbian and bisexual women discursively construct the
phallocentric and heterosexist concept of virginity in their everyday
conversations? 2) Do they challenge the dominant definition of
virginity, which is exclusively based on the heterosexual act of the
penile penetration of the vagina, by constructing alternative
definitions of the concept? These questions are significant because
they aim not only to recognize and understand a critical aspect of a
marginalized community but also to empower that community by making
their resistant perspectives and practices visible.
Based on these research questions, the hypothesis of the
study can be formulated as follows: “Lesbian and bisexual
women
challenge the hetero/sexist definition of virginity by discursively
constructing alternative definitions of virginity based on their
personal sexual identities and experiences.”
The study proposed here is directly relevant to several
research fields including gender studies, queer studies, sexuality
studies, and discourse analysis studies. By specifically examining
lesbian and bisexual women’s alternative discursive
constructions of
virginity, a critical aspect of women’s sexuality, the
findings of the
study can contribute to gender, sexuality, and language studies. These
findings could also be useful for sex education research or sexual
health studies. Moreover, because the methodology of this study is
shaped around feminist ethics, the study can offer a case study to
illustrate how feminist principles of giving voice to women,
acknowledging women’s agency and resistance, highlighting
women’s
experiences, and empowering women through research can be applied in
practice. In short, the study will attempt to contribute to a diverse
range of research fields not only on a theoretical but also on a
methodological basis.
Anindita
Chatterjee, Telling
tales
in gendered spaces: Ritual narratives in the Lokkhi Pooja of Bengal
This talk will examine the narrative of a religious ritual
“Lokkhi
Pooja”, an established traditional ritual of Bengal, which
takes place
on the auspicious 15th day of the dark fortnight, once in a year.
Narratives are an important feature of Bengal and the narration serves
to complete the act. Although considered to be essential to complete
the ritual, the narrative exists in a liminal space, in which neither
the male votary nor the male priest are present; rather, the audience
and the narrator are the female members of the household and
neighbourhood.
In this talk I will analyze whether the female space created in the
ritual by the narrative has the subversive potential, noted in the
literature to inhere in tale-telling in the contexts of same sex
interaction. I will aim to argue that the space created in the
narratives divests them of their interactive nature, thereby almost
entirely eliminating their potential to gain an emancipatory status,
which poses a challenge to patriarchy.
The narratives, or kathas, that are performed are determined by the
marital status of a woman, Kumari katha read by unmarried woman,
sadhoba katha read by married woman and bidhoba katha is read by
widows. I will concentrate on an instance of a sadhoba katha read by a
married woman, by means of a video presentation and try to contrast the
styles of two narrations of the same katha by the same narrator, once
when it is told outside the ritual space, and once during the ritual.
In the first case, the tale is told with feeling and empathy, but
within the ritual space, it is read from an established text, in a
style that has no characteristics of a spontaneous narration. This
difference will lead us to explore the patriarchal nature of ritual
spaces, and the role of women’s participation in their
perpetuation.
Applications and Discussions
Laura
J. Wright & Kara
McGinnis, Getting
a hand in hands-on
science activities: A video ethnographic analysis of gender and object
manipulation in two diverse middle school science classrooms
Research on laboratory participation and gender has linked
boys’
overall greater success in science to their preponderance to handle
equipment and materials (Jovanic & King, 1998; Kahle, Parker,
Rennie, & Riley, 1993; Kelly, 1988; Tobin, 1987). What is less
understood, however, is what actually happens in laboratory groups to
afford boys or fail to afford girls the opportunity to engage in object
manipulation. As Singer, Hilton, and Schweingruber (2005) report, few
detailed descriptions of laboratory experiences exist and little is
known about laboratory experiences in general.
This paper provides a close analysis of middle school laboratory
experiences using video data from an ethnographic project in 2
different schools in suburban Washington, D.C.. We analyze the actions
and interactions of 8 middle school students in 2 groups of 2 boys and
2 girls each during implementations of a highly-rated,
laboratory-centered curriculum unit, Exploring Motion and Forces
(Harvard Smithsonian, 2001). The video ethnographies took place during
2004 and 2006 and resulted in more than 75 hours of video. The video
data were transcribed using a qualitative video analysis software
called Atlas.ti, and resulted in a corpus of searchable transcripts.
The transcripts were then hyperlinked to the videos to allow for both
verbal and visual coding of the data.
We begin by situating our analysis quantitatively, providing
curriculum-long coding results of the number of minutes students were
visually observed to be engaged in object manipulation, a moment in
which he/she actively handles a scientifically relevant object
prescribed by the curriculum unit. Results indicate that only one of
the girls, Wendy, surpasses the boys in overall quantity of object
manipulation. Our paper details the discursive and non-verbal
strategies that Wendy uses, as well as strategies that the curriculum
unit supports. We provide qualitative examples of the independent
strategies that she employs to gain access to and maintain control of
the materials. In addition, we examine the way that Wendy utilizes the
curriculum unit’s design features such as role sharing to
foster
participation within her lab group. For example, when conducting an
experiment with a washer-driven car, Wendy calls out to the other
students that they must switch roles, managing the participation of her
entire lab group.
We propose that what may seem to be insignificant moments of
face-to-face interaction are actually critical in efforts to increase
girls’ participation in laboratory experiences, and, more
broadly,
girls’ overall success in science. Moreover, we contend that
sociocultural linguistics is useful for identifying and understanding
strategies of laboratory participation so that they can be incorporated
into curriculum materials to provide further support for
girls’
participation in lab experiences and in scientific practice.
Madeleine Adkins, "Language crossing and stylization at work: The Irish accent in theatrical rehearsals"
Lori
Britt, Crafting an
Organizational Identity through Discourse: Becoming an IB PYP School
Community
How does a school “market” itself as different in a
public school arena
that now promotes choice for parents? How, in their talk, do school
administrators and staff create an identity of difference, of being a
unique kind of learning community within a system that has been largely
required to deliver equal opportunities to all students? Looking at the
discourse at public meetings held to promote an elementary school which
is offering the International Baccalaureate Organizations Primary Years
Programme, the researcher focuses on how the organization’s
mission of
“developing inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people
who help
to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural
understanding and respect” is brought to life discursively.
An AIDA or action-implicative discourse analytical approach
reveals the rhetorical use of narratives and macro construction
strategies that both presume and emphasize sameness and/or difference
in the talk. In addition, the talk uncovers constitutive rhetorical
activity which seeks to call forth a particular type of people for
action (Burke, 1950, Charland, 1987) which enlists learners to embody
the discursive identity of a global learner. This study allows us to
consider the complexities that are inherent in an educational system
that is undergoing a paradigmatic shift toward a market model.
Internets
Joshua
Raclaw, The automated
speaker: An analysis of two patterns of conversational closings in
instant message discourse
In this paper, I analyze two patterns of conversational closings
(Schegloff and Sacks 1973) used by speakers in synchronous
computer-mediated discourse (CMD) environments. I look specifically at
how closings operate in instant messages, a format that remains
relatively unexplored within interactional linguistic studies of online
talk-in-interaction. The analysis makes use of the conversation
analytic framework (e.g. Sacks 1992) and particularly Button's (1987)
notion of the archetype closing, defined as the organization of a
closing as the exchange of two adjacency pairs: the pre-closing
sequence, consisting of a pair of topically-neutral utterances that
invite a temporary suspension of the turn-taking mechanism; and the
terminal exchange, consisting of a pair of goodbyes or similar
utterances that effectively mark each speaker's orientation to the
conversation's close.
The data for this project comes from a corpus of 30 conversations held
through the AIM instant messenger program, collected from college-aged
speakers in 2005. Within these interactions, closing sequences were
organized by whether they followed the basic structure of the archetype
closing sequence or veered notably from it. I divide these into the
categories of expanded archetype closings and partially automated
closings, respectively. The expanded archetype closing, seen in Excerpt
1, includes an easily identified set of pre-closing sequences (lines 1
and 2) and terminal exchanges (lines 7 and 8), but each sequence also
includes features such as accounts, arrangements, hedges and other
markers of dispreference (lines 1, 2, and 3; Pomerantz 1984), as well
as a post-closing, the automated message sent to one's interlocutor
after setting an away message or signing out of the AIM program (line
9).
Excerpt 1
1 metonym: so i should like, probably start writing my paper (11.0)
2 pudding: yeah i should probably go to bed (8.0)
3 metonym: so i will talk to you tomorrow, jah [yes]? (7.0)
4 pudding: jah [yes] (6.0)
5 pudding: good luck writing!!! (2.0)
6 metonym: thanks! (2.0)
7 pudding: latahz [i'll talk to you later] (3.0)
8 pudding: haha, bye (9.0)
9 metonym is away
The partially automated closing, seen in Excerpt 2, replaces what would
otherwise be entire turns at talk in spoken archetype closing sequences
with features specific to the medium, such as automated messages. For
example, within Excerpt 2, sonorant begins the pre-closing with an
account of why they have to close in line 1, which prettygirl orients
to and acknowledges in line 2. While a post-closing occurs in line 3,
the conversation effectively ends before the speakers appear to engage
in a terminal exchange or otherwise close the interaction. In other
examples, post-closings appear before the second speaker is shown to
orient to the pre-closings, or in cases where there is a long gap in
the discourse, they may occur without any formal pre-closing or
terminal exchange at all.
Excerpt 2
1 sonorant: hey i have to go shower before i go out tonight. (5.0)
2 prettygirl: okay. (3.0)
3 sonorant is away
My analysis of these closing sequences demonstrates how speakers within
the IM discourse environment are able to enact these types of closing
sequences by orienting to the post-closing as a form of terminal
exchange that also serves the interactional function of halting the
turn-taking mechanism (a function that is normally reserved, in the
archetype model, for pre-closings). I also argue that partially
automated closings are allowable because speakers orient to the nature
of IMs as a site for persistent conversation, an aspect of the medium
that is made relevant due to features of the AIM program such as the
buddy list and away message. The analysis also discusses how partially
automated closings share a structure that is far more common in
face-to-face closings than telephone closings, thus challenging the
commonly-held assumption that IMs are simply a text-based form of
discourse that more closely emulates the phone than any other form of
mediated communication.
Jennifer
Kontny, Usurping
the
Virtual Floor: Online “error” correction sequences
as pre-emptive strategies
In their article, Schönfeldt and Golato (2003) argue that
online
repair strategies are altered from face-to-face repair strategies only
when necessary. More generally, this suggests that the organizational
properties of conversation are generally transferred from an offline to
an online context. Although the many similarities between online and
offline talk suggest that this is often the case, this assertion raises
many questions regarding the existing disparities between talk in these
respective contexts and suggests that disparities between online and
offline talk are a profitable locus for analysis. This paper
specifically examines the unique qualities of correction in virtual
communities and explores the ways in which correction online has been
adapted as a tactic to gain the otherwise complex and elusive online
conversational floor.
Despite the dispreferredness of other-initiated,
other-repair in many online and offline contexts (Schegloff, Jefferson
& Sacks 1977; Schönfeldt and Golato 2003), I argue
that correction
occurs more prevalently and is organized in fundamentally different
ways in online forums than in face-to-face talk. I specifically address
the unique features of correction sequences in online forums arguing
that these differently-organized sequences are reflective of the
innovative ways in which they have come to function in online
conversation. Using examples from a social networking website, I
examine how deviations from standard spelling, punctuation and syntax
are a frequent means of initiating the act of correcting during online
interaction. For example, instead of the three-component organization
of correction in talk (X, Y, Y or X, Y, X) initially proposed by
Jefferson (1987), online correction sequences are extended where the
corrected participant, often, in their next turn, takes on the role of
the corrector. Consider the below example:
MySpace Forums >> General Discussion >>
What's your current “obsession”?
wanna dance: Tetrus. I'm addicted to it.
Emily: then u should know its TETRIS.
wanna dance: Excuse my spelling error, u master of the English
language, u.
Here, while “Emily” corrects “wanna
dance's” spelling, “wanna dance”
does not accept or reject this correction in her next turn, as
Jefferson would propose. She instead mocks “Emily”
by correcting her
use of the abbreviated “u” for
“you”. Correction in sequences such as
these is extended into subsequent turns. In fact, the conversational
move of correction is so effective at usurping the virtual floor in a
forum conversation, political debates often become dialogues about
comma usage and exchanges about relationship break-ups easily turn into
feuds about spelling.
Further then, both the pervasiveness of correction within the
contexts of online forums, as well as its organization, should be
explained in conjunction with the unique function correction seems to
play within these contexts. I conclude the paper by maintaining that
ultimately online correction is a successful tactic to gain the virtual
floor by distinguishing, illegitimating and denaturalizing another
participant's identity (Bucholtz & Hall 2005). In other words,
participants online make use of correction creatively as a way to
pre-empt others' contributions--as a means to vie for, and eventually
usurp, the otherwise elusive virtual conversational floor.
Lauren
Squires, People who
type
"lyk dis all da time": exploring language ideologies and linguistic
artifacts through meta-Netspeak
Linguistic variation in computer-mediated discourse (CMD) has received
the recent attention of scholars seeking more adequate sociolinguistic
approaches to studying the internet (e.g. Paolillo 2001; Raclaw
&
Squires 2006). This research has worked with impoverished knowledge
about speakers' linguistic orientations to the internet and to
text-based variation in general. The internet's effects on language
seem to be of great concern to English speakers around the world, as is
well-documented in Thurlow's (2006) analysis of media reportage about
CMD. Yet despite documentation of linguistic variation in online
practice (Baron 2005; Raclaw 2006; Squires 2007), there is little
analysis of internet users' own understandings of such variation.
This project explores folk perceptions of CMD, taking folk
metalanguage as a fruitful site of language ideologies (see Blommaert
& Verschueren 1998; Niedzielski & Preston 2003;
Coupland &
Jaworski 2004). My point of departure is an interrogation of the
concept represented by terms like "Netspeak": a distinctive variety of
language used in CMD (Crystal 2001). To do so, I analyze two
English-language comment threads formed in response to a published
college newspaper column about the internet's negative effects on
English. The threads' topic is explicitly language used online, hence
they represent a fertile source of focused, naturalistic metadiscourse.
I first discuss the profile of Netspeak that emerges from the comments:
what features does it consist of, and who speaks it? I find that
features such as acronyms (< LOL > for < laugh out
loud >)
and rebus-like letter replacements (< u > for <
you >) are
highly salient and often subsumed under evaluative categories like "bad
grammar," and that speakers often attribute Netspeak to teenage girls
and lazy people. I next discuss language-ideological underpinnings of
the comments, namely that "good English" exists and is in danger,
though the internet is just one factor contributing to its demise.
Situating this speaker-produced metadiscourse within a larger
context of institutionally-driven public discourse about the internet
and English, I suggest that these differently-sited metadiscourses echo
one another to construct Netspeak as a linguistic artifact (after
Preston 1996). In the construction of Netspeak, variation is ignored;
of particular interest is the erasure of standard English practiced
online, since "Netspeak" effectively equates internet discourse with
nonstandard language. The dominant ideology of standard English is
reinforced by erasure of the ideologically dominant variety (itself an
artifact) from a specific field of discourse, protecting "good English"
from the perceived dangers of the internet--a feared social space (see
Paradis 2005). I hope to illustrate that language ideologies set
sociolinguistic parameters for licensing variation in practice, but
that both discourse (linguistic practice) and metadiscourse (talk about
practice) are also active mechanisms of ideological production. In
explicitly relating ideologies, discourse, and metadiscourse in this
way, we are compelled to attend to the dialogue between metadiscourse
from different layers of social interaction.
Ethnicity
Jennifer
Garland, "Little
worlds":
Imagined domains of use among learners of a minority language
Shrinking domains of use has long been noted in endangered
languages (e.g., Dorian, 1989). Since the primary focus of studies on
endangered languages has been their use by native and heritage speakers
(e.g., Jaffe, 1999; Cavanaugh, 2004) the presumed aim of learners of
such languages is to identify with the native-speaking community and
use the language appropriately within that setting. This paper
investigates a different language learning setting in which students do
not all share a heritage connection to the language, nor do they reside
in areas where it is spoken.
The study investigates the imagined domains of use for Irish
Gaelic among learners at a summer language school in County Donegal,
Ireland, whose students come from both inside and outside Ireland. Some
of those from outside Ireland have Irish heritage while others do not.
Because they do not reside in Irish-speaking communities, these
students must seek out opportunities, such as classes or conversation
groups, to use their Irish once they return home. Thus the question of
what they want to use Irish for is partly an issue of imagination. I
offer an analysis based on the questions students ask in class, with
support from ethnographic interviews and participant-observation. When
students ask how to say something in Irish, they can often be seen to
construct an imaginary scenario in which they might want to use such a
word or expression, as in the following example.
(E is Erin, a female American student in her twenties, A is the teacher)
1. E; if somebody's,
2. like,
3. teasing you:,
4. o:r,
5. you can tell somebody's sort of like,
6. trying to ruffle your feathers or whatever?
7. A; right,
8. E; how do you say stuff like,
9. you know o:h what are you getting on about,
10. or:,
11. stop your jabbering:,
By asking how to respond to someone who is ‘trying to ruffle
your
feathers’ (line 6), Erin establishes her orientation toward
using Irish
in an informal social setting. Her candidates for translation into
Irish in lines 8-13 are colloquial, informal expressions in English.
Notably, her first suggestion ‘what are you getting on
about’ appears
to be a rendering of Irish English rather than the American English to
which she might be expected to resort for such informal expressions.
This expression could mark her potential environment for using these
expressions as being in Ireland (most likely at the pub up the street,
a point which is made clear in a later segment of the interaction).
This example reveals that for Erin, Irish is suitable for informal,
non-serious social interaction and is connected to a particular
location, the pub. This reflects the state of Erin’s
‘little world’ (a
term taken from an interview with another student) for the use of Irish
at the time of the recording. These potential uses reflect ideologies
about what Irish is good for. Other examples in my data show a similar
orientation to fun and social settings, as well as other uses of Irish.
George
Figgs & Brent Nichoas, "Strategic orthography in hiphop:
Monikers, aliasing, and naming practices of MCs"
Satoko
Kobayashi, "Japs and
FOBs":
Positioning of Selves and Others among Transnational High School
Students
Contesting the “model-minority” stereotype, much
research on
identities of transnational Asian students has focused on social
differentiations between Asian ethnics (e.g. Lee 1994) and among
students of an ethnic group (e.g. Kanno 2003). However, these studies
tend to treat their participants homogeneously according to social
categories, while students, who are seemingly of the same ethnicity,
social class, gender, language background, and social group,
differentiate each other by discursively using various labels even in
the same school. This ethnographic study investigates the relation
between social identity and differentiation among transnational
Japanese high school students in Los Angeles by utilizing 2-year
ethnography with 25 key participants and in-depth discourse analysis of
their narratives and conversations within face-to-face and online
contexts.
The study examines how these students position selves and others by
differentiating each other through the discursive use of ethnic labels
such as “Nihonjin (Japanese),”
“Jap” and “FOB (Fresh-Off-the
Boat).”
The conversation below occurred between Shiho and me as we reached the
cafeteria when she gave me a campus tour. She explained that
“Japs”
stay there during lunch time.
Shiho: It’s funny that I know them. I don’t talk to
those…Japs, but I hear about them from my friends
Satoko: Oh really? Oh, I wanna go into that lunch area.
Shiho: You wanna go there? To see the typical Japs? I don’t
want to go straight in there. Because they are gonna say hi to me and
after that, they will only talk to you.
Shiho differentiates herself from the students in the cafeteria by
calling them “those Japs” and emphasizing that she
does not directly
talk to them but only indirectly hear about them from her friends.
Also, she stresses the boarder between those students and herself by
indicating that they would recognize her but would not welcome her as a
member of the group. In spite of her emphasis on the difference between
“Japs” and herself, her linguistic practice
demonstrates that the
social differentiation is reinforced by and reinforcing the constraints
on the image that they, at least imaginatively, belong to a Japanese
community in the high school.
Through the analysis of these linguistic practices by students, who
recognize selves belonging in different social groups, I show that
factors such as physical spaces at school, ELD levels, friendship with
“Americans,” gender, age, attendance of cramming
school, and length in
the US are all used as the basis for labeling; however, it is erased
when students return to Japan and embrace a shared identity as
“returnee.” In this way, students linguistically,
spatially and
imaginatively negotiate their own and others’ social
identities beyond
the demographic ethnic categories.
Pragmatics
I-wen
Su, Politeness
Revisited:
Taking Generation into Consideration
Language never exists in a vacuum. It always serves as a
communicative tool for the speaker to fulfill his intention of action.
Such pragmatic essence of language has established an ecological niche
where tons of seminal works have been devoted to the patterns and
motivations of how people use language to do things. As a mature
communication involves two parties, the mutual concern for each other
is non-trivial in that it often plays a regulating role in determining
certain linguistic patterns (Leech 1983; Levinson 2000).
In light of the fact that people seldom follow strictly the
maxims (Grice 1975) and often deviate from the maxims, Brown and
Levinson (1987) attempted to supplement and modify the cooperative
principle by resorting those deviating from the pragmatic maxims to
politeness phenomenon. According to them, the Cooperative Principle
defines an “unmarked” or socially neutral
presumptive framework of
communication; whereas Politeness Principles are the principled reasons
for deviations.
This paper intends to re-examine the Politeness Principle
proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) in the context of Chinese
culture. In their model, the weightiness of a Face Threatening Act
(FTA) is calculated on the basis of three culturally-sensitive
variables: social distance, relative power and absolute ranking. These
three variables are said to affect the interlocutors’
decisions to
perform any linguistic act that concerns the
“face”—the public
self-image that every social member wants. However, Brown and
Levinson’s research has tended to focus on the universality
of
Politeness Principle, rather than on the linguistic relativity across
different cultures. Therefore, it is argued in the present study that
the concept of generation should be considered as a sub-type of the
Power variable in Chinese culture, one that may be more important than
“age.”
Linguistic data of several types are employed to demonstrate
the significance of the hierarchy of generation in Chinese
“politeness”: (1) sayings in Mandarin Chinese and
Southern-Min; (2)
Chinese idioms; (3) kinship terms and naming practice; (4) the format
of addresses in letter-writing. The data collected appear to support
that in determining the weightiness of an FTA, while
‘power’ serves as
a function of representing an asymmetrical relationship between
interlocutors, what truly exerts the explanatory power in Chinese
culture are generation and age instead, with the former as the major
guidance. How Politeness Principle works in details may need a more
fine-grained analysis on the interaction between universality and
linguistic relativity, taking culture into consideration. In Chinese
culture, factors of age and generation appear to matter more than the
factor of social distance. It is thus hoped that the present study may
enhance the explanatory adequacy of the Politeness Principle where
cultural difference may be at work.
Elizabeth Knutson, "Listening in a foreign language: A study of backchanneling in French"
Globalization
Liliana
Leitner-Laserna, Practicing
the Logic of Conspiracy: Western Biomedicine and Traditional Healing
for HIV/AIDS in South Africa
In this paper I assert that the cultural framework of Xhosa
traditional healing and witchcraft complicates assumptions made from
the biomedical framework about HIV prevention and treatment.
Specifically, I challenge the common argument that “increased
availability of antiretrovirals [ARVs], which turns HIV/AIDS into a
chronic, rather than a terminal, disease, will contribute substantially
to the decrease of stigma in South Africa, as elsewhere”
(Stein 2003).
I argue that a biomedical explanatory model regarding the relationship
between ARV treatment and HIV stigma is not appropriate to use in a
context of non-western traditional Xhosa approaches to healing and
disease. Using primary data from a focus group and individual
interviews conducted in a township in Cape Town, I analyze the
discourses that HIV positive and negative individuals utilize to
socially construct HIV/AIDS and ARVs. Based on this analysis I argue
that ARVs do not reduce stigma because they transform HIV into a
chronic disease, but rather as a result of ambivalence within
traditional Xhosa framework. On the one hand ARVs signify death,
thereby causing stigma from both HIV positive and negative people, and
on the other hand, ARVs represent the powerful ability for a person to
control and manage the disease in themselves and eventually in others,
thus avoiding the experience of stigma in the western sense. Hence,
what westerners might consider HIV-related stigma interacting within a
biomedical framework of ARV medication, I argue is in fact a case of
stigma as constructed and negotiated within a traditional framework
that utilizes and makes sense of biomedical elements (such as ARVs) and
discourses within the local ideology. The two practices have become
part of a single interpretive system and their interaction should be
taken into consideration.
I will first explain how traditional healing and witchcraft in South
Africa generally operates in order to, secondly, illuminate how this
ideological context challenges western assumptions about the concepts
of adherence, stigma, peer education and chronic disease. Indeed,
whether English or Xhosa words are used contributes to how these
concepts are played out differently in a traditional framework than in
a biomedical framework: what is seen as biomedical
“adherence” in a
traditional model involves the notion that white people are witches who
cause and potentially heal the disease; a seemingly neutral choice of
English to describe HIV-related topics is actually a linguistic effort
to distance the Xhosa person from the disease; what is seen as a
western “stigma reduction” may be an affect of
HIV’s invisibility
rather than its destigmatization from a traditional view;
“peer
education” may in fact be a patient-healer interaction from a
traditional Xhosa discourse; what may be presumed to be a person living
chronically with HIV may be seen as a potential healer. Thirdly I will
discuss the critical role that local epistemologies have for improving
HIV treatment and prevention in public health efforts to slow the
pandemic and suggest future research to deepen the analysis.
Chad
Nilep, Language,
Learning,
and Globalization: Interdisciplinary Investigation of Foreign Language
Learners
Foreign language learning is of interest to scholars in a variety
of subdisciplines, including applied linguistics, education,
bilingualism, and educational anthropology. Furthermore, its
“globalized” nature sometimes interests
sociocultural anthropologists,
ethnolinguists, and various critical scholars. How can a sociocultural
linguist whose interests lie in linguistic anthropology and discourse
analysis, but whose fieldwork involves foreign language learners,
contribute to this broad interdisciplinary conversation?
My current research combines participant observation and
close analysis of discourse in order to investigate the ways that
participants in “Hippo Family Club,” a
transnational language-study
group, (re)create discourses of what the club means and how it works.
My own interests relate primarily to linguistic ideologies and the
construction of identity. At the same time, though, the nature of the
subjects and field sites makes the work of interest to various scholars
and obliges me to consider diverse perspectives.
This presentation, then, has two elements. First, I describe
the practices of Hippo Family Club member-learners in the United
States, Japan, and elsewhere. Special attention is given to the
construction of an imagined, international “family”
of users. Second, I
reflect on my attempts to position this work, and on the uptake by
scholars in various subdisciplines.
Hippo Family Club is an international organization founded in
Japan and dedicated to learning foreign languages. Members listen to
audio recordings of multiple foreign languages and repeat the stories
they hear. Then, once per week all members meet to play games, sing
songs, and recite together stories from the recordings. In these weekly
meetings, children and adults, veterans and novices are all expected to
work together to re-tell the stories and to practice speaking target
languages. In this way, members believe that they can learn several
foreign languages at the same time, without studying grammar,
translation, or other elements of traditional language learning.
Participant observation and discourse analysis reveal
particular ideologies of language and of socialization in
members’
practices. For instance, members claim that they are able to acquire
multiple languages “naturally,” without study.
There is, at the same
time, an orientation to wider social expectations that language
learning is difficult: members frequently testify to newcomers that
they had low initial expectations for the learning method, and were
surprised by their eventual triumph in becoming multilingual.
Whenever I present my observations and findings related to
Hippo ideology and identity, I am asked questions such as,
“How
effective are these methods?” Naturally, participant
observation does
not yield the sort of data normally used to answer such questions in
the fields of assessment and testing, second language acquisition, or
applied linguistics. I am able, though, to relate grounded observations
of affective factors, and to show specific examples of
learner’s
target-language discourse. At the same time, I find the consideration
of individuals’ face-to-face practices vital to grounding
macro-level
analyses of globalization, modernity, and language ideologies. Field
methods combining ethnographic observation and close analysis of
discourse thus contribute both to understandings of identity and
ideology, and to questions related to educational practices and
outcomes.
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