This chapter considers Wallace’s use of individual language and narrative as a means for self-creation, from the heavily be-nicknamed LaVache in Broom, who molds his vocabulary to evade communication with his family, to the impersonal marketing argots of commercial focus groups, by way of the community-forming ritual recitations of AA. The chapter highlights Wallace’s extraordinarily prolific (though not uniformly successful) mimesis of vernacular, noting some of the more interesting failures of his career in this respect, including “Solomon Silverfish” and sections of Infinite Jest. This chapter elucidates the operation of language, both monologic and dialogic, as key to Wallace’s aesthetic project and as a central weapon in his ethical strategy for overcoming solipsism, involving sincerity, cooperation and absolute faith in the other.

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.

This chapter focuses on the performance of impoliteness, through the lens of insults and other mocking language. Impoliteness has been documented as a tool men use to perform masculinity and bond with other men. Disney and Pixar films reflect this practice by portraying insults as associated naturally with masculinity, and often frame insults between men as silly and rapport-building. Female characters insulting others isn’t typically seen as “funny” in Disney, with some clear exceptions, including older characters (highlighting the “sassy old lady” trope). There is also some evidence that the more recent characters of color have more impolite utterances, suggesting that women of color are also an ideological exception to polite femininity. Discourses of masculinity in Disney and Pixar sanction insults as an expression of emotion, but portray more straightforward forms of affection as less common and/or less desirable. For femininity, the opposite discourse is upheld: polite forms are framed as natural, or desirable ways to express feeling, but insults have negative consequences.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of directives and the variation in their syntactic forms as related to gender and power. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. This chapter focuses on who gives and receives directives, and more specifically on the function of linguistic mitigation strategies and how they correlate with the gender of the speaker and addressee in Disney and Pixar films. The issuing of directives is very common in Disney and Pixar films; because they are an essential plot element, their frequency is unrelated to gender. However, the use of mitigation as a politeness strategy is strongly correlated with gender in both Disney and Pixar, independent of other important contextual variables such as urgency and institutional power (p < .01 for both data sets). In the films, male authority is shown as hierarchical, direct, and aggressive; female authority is shown as subtle, and based on persuasion, suggestion, and collaboration — a pattern which echoes research findings on real-life behavior across a number of contexts.

The Walt Disney corporation and its affiliates wield a huge amount of power in our modern media landscape, especially in regards to children’s media. In turn, a selection of evidence presented in this chapter argues that the linguistic patterning in media has an effect on children, in particular on their ideas about the social world and gender. Thus, Disney is an important area of study for understanding the effect of media on children, specifically in terms of language and gender. This chapter restates the importance of conducting sociolinguistic research on scripted media, and defends this methodological practice. Further, it also explains the methodology of the book, which includes both quantitative and qualitative research in order to assess the role of media representations in the construction of gender and gendered discourses. Finally, this chapter outlines the book in full, which includes a historical context of Disney and Pixar, a quantitative examination of speech amounts broken down by gender, an examination of specific speech acts (compliments, directives, insults, and apologies), and an qualitative examination of queerness in Disney films.

This chapter begins the sociolinguistic journey of the book, focusing on quantitative analysis of compliments alongside more detail-oriented qualitative analysis. Compliments, as a speech act, work to attribute ‘goods’ to others and thus naturally carries larger value judgments about what a society views as ‘good.’ Compliments in childrens’ movies likewise act as a lens to reveal what the filmmakers consider worthy of praise in their characters — and importantly, whether that varies by gender. In Disney and Pixar films, compliment giving is not presented as particularly gendered but receiving compliments skews towards female recipients. Qualitatively, female characters on-screen together are portrayed as using compliments as a routine politeness strategy and female villains use the guise of this practice to hide more nefarious purposes. This chapter also finds some tentative initial evidence linking femininity and politeness. While compliments are used by both male and female characters, the female characters use compliments as a routine politeness or rapport-building strategy, whereas male characters complimenting another outside task-based settings is less routine, and at times even framed as a climatically “big deal.” This suggests that although characters of either gender can compliment, compliments as a routine politeness strategy is still associated more closely with femininity.

This chapter focuses on apologies, another active, face-saving politeness strategy. Apologies are a way of conducting politeness and preserving interpersonal relationships. There is a clear perception that women apologize more, or apologize unnecessarily, and this chapter examines if that is reflected in Disney and Pixar films. Quantitatively, both male and female characters apologize in these films, and in a certain proportion of the cases the authors suspect this is determined more by the specifics of the plot than by gender or any other characteristic of the speaker. At the same time, the authors find some patterning at the extremes that seems more clearly linked to gender. While apologizing may not be marked as specifically associated with femininity, non-apology strategies do seem to be mostly used by the male characters. One explanation for this is that women have been held more responsible for maintaining social relations and catering to the face needs of others. Femininity may be tied to a focus on making sure the social harm is repaired, while masculinity involves more of an emphasis on producing the speech act of the apology while (if possible) hedging against the inherent face threat it involves.

Chapter 5 describes the four chief domains of linguistic politeness in Korean: speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and gendered language. Based on characteristics of those four areas, the chapter proposes different variables governing when and how to use different components of polite language, in addition to two exceptional subcases of honorifics. The term “politeness” is used in this chapter in a broad sense to denote any linguistic expression that shows respect. Honorifics are a major component of linguistic politeness in this sense, but far from the only one.

The chapter focuses on an innovative set of methods and approaches designed to change the manner in which business professionals view language and communication practices in their global workplaces. Despite the advances made within linguistics, particularly within the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, where large banks of empirical evidence of real-life workplace research have been systematically analysed, very little of this robust linguistic evidence finds its way into practical applications in workplace training. Too often, business training materials are based on outdated and inaccurate stereotypes about language at work, or flawed frameworks, such as ‘neurolinguistic programming’, which at best is based on pseudo-scientific knowledge and devoid of any real foundation of how any language system works. Other training methods include role-plays of how people think they communicate. In order to get the sociolinguistics of the workplace research firmly embedded as a form of applied linguistics in action, the chapter reports on the practical methods and approaches taken as part of an initiative at the University of Nottingham, Linguistic Profiling for Professionals.

In this morphopragmatic and sociolinguistic contribution, the use of expressive German adjective and noun compounds is investigated in two Austrian corpora, an oral corpus of informal conversations among adults of different sociodemographic backgrounds and a written newspaper corpus. For the qualitative analysis, the study differentiates between direct and indirect aggressive discourse. Although sets of compounds with identical second adjective constituent are denotatively synonymic, the denotative meaning of the second constituent, whereas the first constituent has largely lost its denotative in favour of connotative meaning. Therefore, there is no lexical blocking among the sets of adjectival compounds which have changed into morphopragmatic semiprefixations. Quantitative results show that pejorative expressive compounds are more frequent than meliorative ones. Expressive noun compounds are more frequent in aggressive discourse, although expressive adjective compounds have a higher overall frequency. In informal conversations, direct insults and self-insults are rare, but indirect negative assessments of other persons and complaints about awkward situations prevail. A gender trend indicates that women use slightly fewer negative expressive compounds than men, and an SES effect shows that participants with lower educational levels use fewer positive expressive compounds.

In addition to time and place, which are inseparable from sociolinguistic variation, language may vary according to age, social class, sex or (social) gender, ethnicity, medium, style, and register. Contact between speakers often leads to change, and different patterns result according to whether this contact involves first-language (L1) or second language (L2) acquisition. Thus, ‘family tree’ aspects of language change are largely accounted for by transmission (involving L1 acquisition), whilst ‘wave model’ changes can be explained in terms of diffusion (involving L2 acquisition). Languages with a high degree of L2 contact will tend to simplify, whilst stable bilingualism or isolation will often lead to complexification. Contact may be interlinguistic or intralinguistic, sometimes resulting in complex linguistic repertoires, with up to four different levels existing simultaneously (national standard, regional standard, interdialectal koiné, local dialect). Contact may also result in code-switching, the emergence of contact vernaculars, and ‘language death’. The receptiveness of a variety to contact influence depends on the extent to which its social networks are open or closed and on the social attitudes of its speakers. Standard languages emerge through a variety of conscious and unconscious processes, and attempts may be made to give non-standard speech varieties a distinct linguistic identity through codification and the creation of literature.

In France, Cécile Goï questions the notion of cultural otherness while mocking the times when she played with the Gypsies in her small village as a child. This experience was the seed of her first "gesture of indignation" in response to ostracism related to cultural and linguistic diversity.  Making sense of such experiences produced to a profound reflection on social cohesion, equal opportunities, and educational success, in particular for newly arrived students.