Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T18:36:51.267Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Conversational performance and the poetic construction of an ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2004

GAIL SHUCK
GAIL SHUCK
Affiliation:
Department of English, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725, gshuck@boisestate.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study places conversational performance, or speakers' attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse.I wish to thank Jane Hill, Kimberly Jones, Douglas Adamson, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and on the dissertation from which it comes. I also greatly appreciate Jane McGary's careful editing.

Keywords

Oral performancelinguistic ideologynonnative speakerideological discourseverbal interactionyoung adult discourseverbal art in conversation
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 195 - 222
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

American Civil Liberties Union (2002). ACLU sues four major airlines over discrimination against passengers. http://www.aclu.org/news/2002/n060402b.html.
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRef
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The dialogic imagination, Michael Holquist (ed.), Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine.
Bauman, Richard (1977). Verbal art as performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
Bauman, Richard (1986). Story, performance, and event: Contextual studies of oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Bauman, Richard (1992). Icelandic legends: the traditionalization of genre. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 125–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, Richard, & Briggs, Charles (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.Google Scholar
Becker, Alton L. (1979). Text-building, epistemology, and aesthetics in Javanese shadow theatre. In A. L. Becker & A. Yengoyan (eds.), The imagination of reality, 211–43. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Becker, Alton L. (1984). The linguistics of particularity: Interpreting superordination in a Javanese text. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 425–36. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.CrossRef
Blommaert, Jan, & Verschueren, Jef (1992). The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. Pragmatics 2:355–75.Google Scholar
Bowen, J. R. (1989). Poetic duels and political change in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra. American Anthropologist 91:25–40.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles (1988). Competence as performance: The creativity of tradition in Mexicano verbal art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Briggs, Charles (1996). Introduction. In C. Briggs (ed.), Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality, 3–40. New York: Oxford University Press.
Briggs, Charles (1998). “You're a liar—you're just like a woman!” Constructing dominant ideologies of language in Warao men's gossip. In Bambi Schieffelin et al. (eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory, 229–55. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buttny, Richard, & Williams, Princess (2000). Demanding respect: The uses of reported speech in discursive constructions of interracial contact. Discourse and Society 11:109–33.Google Scholar
CBS News (2002). Feds detain hundreds of immigrants. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/19/attack/main533627.shtml.
Chafe, Wallace (1993). Prosodic and functional units of language. In Edwards & Lampert, 33–43.
Crawford, James (2000). At war with diversity: U.S. language policy in an age of anxiety. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Edwards, Jane, & Lampert, Martin (eds.) (1993). Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse and research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Erickson, Frederick (1992). They know all the lines: Rhythmic organization and contextualization in a conversational listing routine. In Peter Auer & Aldo Di Luzio (eds.), The contextualization of language, 365–97. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judith (1995). The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62:967–1001.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: Essays on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts, 113–27. New York: Academic Press.
Gumperz, John (1992). Contextualization and understanding. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 229–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haviland, John (1996). “We want to borrow your mouth”: Tzotzil marital squabbles. In Charles Briggs (ed.), Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality, 158–203. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hill, Jane (1992). “Today there is no respect”: Nostalgia, “respect” and oppositional discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) language ideology. Pragmatics 2:263–80.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Wayne (2003). Group will try again to make English Idaho's language. Idaho Statesman, 24 January 2003, 4 Local.
Inda, Jonathan Xavier (2000). Foreign bodies: Migrants, parasites, and the pathological nation. Discourse 22:46–62.Google Scholar
Jaret, Charles (1999). Troubled by newcomers: Anti-immigrant attitudes and action during two eras of mass immigration to the United States. Journal of American Ethnic History 18:9–39.Google Scholar
Kroskrity, Paul (1992). Arizona Tewa kiva speech as a manifestation of linguistic ideology. Pragmatics 2:297–309.Google Scholar
Kroskrity, Paul (1999). Language ideologies, language shift, and the imagination of a Western Mono community: The recontextualization of a Coyote story. In Jef Verschueren (ed.), Language and ideology: Selected papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference, Vol. 1, 270–89. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.
Limón, José (1982). History, Chicano joking, and the varieties of higher education: tradition and performance as critical symbolic action. Journal of the Folklore Institute 19:141–66.Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Müller, Klaus (1992). Theatrical moments. In Peter Auer & Aldo di Luzio, (eds.), The contextualization of language, 199–231. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ochs, Elinor (1990). Indexicality and socialization. In J. W. Stigler et al. (eds.), Cultural psychology, 287–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Philips, Susan U. (1983). The invisible culture: Communication in classroom and community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. New York: Longman.
Shaheen, Jack (2001). Reel bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people. Northampton, MA: Interlink.
Sherzer, Joel (1987). A discourse-centered approach to language and culture. American Anthropologist 89:295–309.Google Scholar
Shuck, Gail (2001). Imagining the native speaker: The poetics of complaint in university student discourse. Dissertation, University of Arizona.
Silverstein, Michael (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In P. Clyne et al. (eds.), The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Silverstein, Michael (1987). Monoglot “standard” in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. (Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies, 13.) Chicago: Center for Psychosocial Studies. Reprinted in Donald Brenneis & Ronald Macaulay (eds.), The matrix of language, 284–306. Boulder: Westview.
Tannen, Deborah (1979). What's in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In Roy Freedle (ed.), New directions in discourse processing, 137–81. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Tannen, Deborah (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tannen, Deborah, & Wallat, Cynthia (1993). Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: Examples from a medical examination/interview. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Framing in discourse, 57–76.
Wilce, James (1998). Eloquence in trouble: The poetics and politics of complaint in rural Bangladesh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolard, Kathryn (1989). Sentences in the language prison: the rhetorical structuring of an American language policy debate. American Ethnologist 16:268–78.Google Scholar
Yankah, Kwesi (1985). Risks in verbal art performance. Journal of Folklore Research 22:133–53.Google Scholar