Language Style as Identity Construction: A Footing and Framing Approach

Despite the prevalence of conceptualizations of style shifting as a reactive phenomenon, conditioned by contextual factors such as formality and audience, style shifting increasingly has come to be viewed as a proactive phenomenon which speakers freely use to shape and re-shape context, as well as their personal and interpersonal identities (e.g. California Style Collective 1993, Coupland forthcoming). In this presentation, we suggest that an explanation for style shifting based on the interactional sociolinguistic notions of footing and frame indexing (e.g. Goffman 1981, Tannen and Wallat 1993) provides a neat encapsulation of some of the central tenets of these more proactive approaches, while at the same time addressing their limitations

The ‘Gay Voice’ and ‘Brospeak’: Towards a Systematic Model of Stance

Taking Elinor Ochs’s (1992) notion of indirect indexicality as a starting point, this chapter explores the significance of stance for studies of sexuality. Stance helps organize identity registers and is thus central in the creation and display of sexuality. After defining stance and reviewing ways in which it has been used in studies of language and sexuality, the chapter analyzes representations of two sexual identity registers: a ‘gay voice’ homosexual identity and a ‘brospeak’ heterosexual identity. The analysis reveals how these representations are based on different configurations of stances that in turn constitute differentially enregistered personae or characterological figures. The chapter concludes with an outline of the ways that the concept of stance may be used in further research, especially with respect to the analysis of sexuality in interaction

Recasting Language and Masculinities in the Age of Desire

In this paper I reconsider a piece of data originally analyzed in Kiesling (2001), in light of a number of theoretical developments in language and gender, language and sexuality, and gender/masculinities studies more widely. Specifically, I explore how we can break down and be more specific about the cultural conception of hegemonic masculinity (as discussed by Connell, 1995) by subdividing it into a set of separate, interacting cultural discourses. These discourses set up the essentialized and naturalized oppositions characteristic of gender, and thus hegemonic masculinity. Another new development in the field of language and gender is the discussion of desire as a theoretical construct by Cameron and Kulick (2003). I suggest that another kind of desire that we should think about (in addition to sexual desire) is ontological desirethe desire to have or emulate qualities of a particular identity to create an identity. This kind of desire helps us understand language and masculinities because it tells us more about the processes of identification and the motivations for them

Enclave, endangered, or simply stable? Explaining the Western Pennsylvania vowel system.

One generalization that can be made about North American dialects of English is that they are changing, in some cases rapidly (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006:304). Also according to the Atlas of North American English (ANAE), however, the Western Pennsylvania (WPA) variety is an exception, relatively stable against a backdrop of dramatic change occurring nearby. Sociolinguists are primarily interested in change, so we have tended to pay relatively little attention to its counterpart. But even if stability appears to be the exception rather than the rule in the history of spoken language, a full account of language variation and change requires exploring the factors that favor stability as well as those that drive change. This study first tests ANAE’s claim about the the stability of the WPA variety, using a much larger dataset. Analysis of vowel formant measures from sociolinguistic interviews with 52 Anglo-American speakers from the Pittsburgh area generally confirms ANAE’s findings both about the quality of WPA vowels and about their stability across apparent time, which is causing this variety to become increasingly different from those of neigboring dialect areas. To account for this, we propose demographic reasons including population loss and the lack of large-scale in-migration, as well as ideological reasons including geographic exceptionalism that leads WPA speakers not to expect their accent to be like others’. Stability is often discussed in the context of enclave and/or endangered dialects, where competition from other varieties and the lack of a critical mass of speakers means that variation may arise or acquire social meaning (eg. Dorian 1989). Since WPA is neither an enclave nor endangered, at least in the short term, our study suggests more generally that we need to think about other contexts for stability

Appeals to semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts of variation

Discussions of folklinguistic accounts of language use are frequently focused on dismissing them because of their limitations. As a result, not a lot is written regarding how such accounts are done and how they ‘work’. This article examines how folklinguistic evaluations are achieved in interaction, particularly through appeals to semiotic registers (Agha 2007). It describes how in explaining their beliefs regarding linguistic variation, speakers frequently produce voicings with varying transparency. These rely on understandings of the social world and bring large collections of linguistic resources into play. They offer rich insights if analytic attention is given to their details because even when evaluating a single variant, whole ways of speaking, and even being, may be utilized. The paper explores in turn how analysis reveals the inseparability of variants, understandings of context and audience, the relationship between linguistic forms and social types, and the performance of social types via the evaluation of semiotic resources. In each section, discussion is grounded in extracts from interviews on Australian English with speakers of this variety of English. Cumulatively they show the primacy of semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts.N/

Decolonizing Listening: Towards an Equitable Approach to Speech Training for the Actor.

This article confirms and deepens an understanding of the negative impact of teaching culturally embedded speech standards to actors who are “othered” by a dominant “somatic norm” within the performing arts. The author analyzes evidence from a three-year longitudinal study of actors within a UK conservatory in relation to the critical frame of the somatic norm and colonized listening practices in the performing arts. The author identifies conscious and unconscious bias within traditional training methods and proposes a decolonizing approach to listening within foundational speech training. The ideological shift outlined follows the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences and moves away from the culturally embedded listening at the core of “effective” speech methods, which focus solely on clarity and intelligibility. The outcome of this research is a radical performance pedagogy, which values the intersectional identities and linguistic capital of students from pluralistic backgrounds. The revised curriculum offers an approach to affective speaking and listening that assumes an equality of understanding from the outset, and requires actors, actor trainers, and, ultimately, audiences to de-colonize their listening ears

Resources, Capabilities, and Routines in Public Organizations

States, state agencies, multilateral agencies, and other non-market actors are relatively under-studied in strategic management and organization science. While important contributions to the study of public actors have been made within the agency-theoretic and transaction-cost traditions, there is little research in political economy that builds on resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to the firm. Yet public organizations can be characterized as stocks of human and non-human resources, including routines and capabilities; they can possess excess capacity in these resources; and they may grow and diversify in predictable patterns according to behavioral and Penrosean logic. This paper shows how resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to understanding public agencies and organizations shed light on their nature and governance