Anthropologie linguistique vs. Sociolinguistique
Iconization, Awareness, Pragmatic Salience
Kathryn Woolard

 

woolard_whyDatNow.pdf — Kathryn A.Woolard, [University of California, San Diego,] “Why dat [vs. that] now?: Linguistic-anthropological contributions to the explanation of sociolinguistic icons and change,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 432–452

Kit Woolard examine l'articulation entre l'anthropologie linguistique et la sociolinguistique, esquisse l'histoire du rapport entre ces deux disciplines et balise le champ dans lequel elles croisent leurs approches. Les références bibliographiques, dans cet article de synthèse, constituent une bibliographie raisonnée des classiques.

 

1 / Indexicalité (Silverstein)

(437-438) Language users everywhere tend to associate particular linguistic forms with specific kinds of speakers or contexts of speaking (a basic assumption of variationist sociolinguistics). Meaning derived in this way from contiguity or association is known in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce (1960) (and others) as indexicality. In Silverstein’s system, which builds on Peirce’s work, first-order indexicality is the pre-ideological but still semiotic work of forming these associations. As Lesley Milroy points out, not only time-honored social categories such as class, gender, and ethnicity can be indexed linguistically, but also such local categories as church or peer group membership (2004: 167). That is, in picking such associative or indexical relations out of the flow of social life and talk, actors – both analysts and community members – do not simply perceive but actually in a sense create and re-create categories of speaking and speakers as well as types of sociolinguistic variables. If first-order indexicality involves a semiotic act of noticing, second-order indexicality brings ideology to bear on the relationship noticed. Silverstein’s second-order indexicality involves the politically and/or morally loaded cultural construal of the first-order indexical association with an intentional content or meaning. At this second level, actors rationalize, explain, and thus inevitably naturalize and ideologize the sociolinguistic associations (indexical relations) that they have registered at the first order.

Lire sur Silverstein et Woolard: Ordre indexical

 

2 / Iconisation d'un locuteur

(438-439) In their studies of the semiotics of distinctiveness and differentiation, Irvine and Gal (2000) have contributed several important concepts of language ideology, particularly that of iconization, which works similarly to Silverstein’s second-order indexicality. In iconization (which Irvine and Gal have recently renamed rhematization [Gal 2005]), actors treat linguistic signs as natural depictions or images of the inherent nature of speakers.(footnote 3) Speakers are taken to be the way that they supposedly sound (e.g. noble, harsh, lazy, rational), and the way that they sound comes to be heard as itself epitomizing that way of being. (The concomitant ideological processes of erasure and fractal recursivity complement and extend the fundamental process of iconization, but I will focus only on this last concept here.)

Another useful but less explored concept for the study of language ideology comes from Errington (1985), who analyzed changes in the famously complex Javanese system of ‘language levels,’ a multi-layered system of lexical registers involved in the expression of degrees of respect and deference to an addressee. To account for the way this system works and particularly for ongoing changes in it, Errington proposed the concept of ‘pragmatic salience:’ native speakers’ awareness of the social significance of different linguistic alternants, manifested both in metapragmatic statements about language and in spontaneous natural use (1985: 294–295). ‘Pragmatically salient’ classes of morphemes are those that are recognized by speakers as more crucial linguistic mediators of social relations.

Each of these theoretical constructs – indexical order, iconization, and pragmatic salience – attends to the way that participants themselves attend to and socially interpret the details of linguistic form. Taken together, they suggest how linguistic ideology can motivate and give direction to specific linguistic changes.

The potential for such theoretical contributions of language ideology studies to explain linguistic form has not been ignored by sociolinguists. Penelope Eckert (2000) and Lesley Milroy (2004) have made especially provocative efforts in this direction, proposing models of speaker agency in linguistic change and of ideological constraints on systemic change, respectively. Eckert argues that sociolinguistic changes can grow from speakers’ consciousness and strategic performative use of specific linguistic forms such as vowel pronunciation to assert membership in particular communities. In Eckert’s model, some details of which are discussed below, each speaker’s linguistic style can be an individually woven fabric of multiple social positionings and claims to membership in various communities. Such a model goes against the grain of the traditional Labovian sociolinguistic claim that major linguistic change comes from below the level of consciousness and is outside the control of the speaker’s intentions and desires (see e.g. Labov 2002).

(footnote 3)

3. The term rhematization has a more precise fit with the terms of Peircian semiotics. Where icon refers to a relationship between a sign and its object, the notion of rheme addresses the relationship between the sign and its interpretant (Gal 2005). In the study of linguistic ideology, what has always been in question is the interpretation of a sociolinguistic element by community members and their projection of an iconic or emblematic relationship between linguistic forms and speakers. Because of their current use in the literatures on linguistic ideology and sociolinguistics, the terms icon/iconization are retained throughout this article, with the understanding that they are meant to capture this social projection of a sign relationship.

 

3 / Des «marqueurs» de la sociolinguistique aux «voix» de la sémiotique

(443-444) Traugott also reconsiders the American English variable that William Labov (1972) labels as (DH), the alternation between voiced interdental fricative and voiced stop, as in these, them, those versus dese, dem, dose. Traugott suggests that (DH) has become a social/style stereotype (Labov 1972, 2001) precisely because this fricative is ‘an almost unique signal of definiteness and deixis’ in English (Traugott 2001: 129). We could say, then, that its specialization in indexical reference makes this phonological element pragmatically salient and especially ripe for social semiotic and stylistic work, as an extended version of Errington’s model would predict. This observation neatly complements the identity-based explanation offered earlier by Eckert (2000: 221), that the stopped variant is a widespread and salient urban marker of emphasis and toughness in the United States because of its association with immigrant groups, variously Italian, Polish, or Spanish-speaking in different urban areas. Eckert argues that the stopped (DH) is picked up by the native English-speaking generation as a tropic marker of toughness paralleling ethnic and class identity, which is a process of creating a second-order indexicality. This explanation is convincing as far as it goes, but it does not tell us why this variable is used to index those populations (so to speak). The pragmatic salience of the lexemes in which the variable typically occurs can provide that part of the explanation, as Traugott’s comments imply. When we put Eckert and Traugott’s accounts together, the variable (DH) appears to be involved in answering both of the questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How am I feeling about this?,’ which may account for its strength as not just a sociolinguistic index but an iconic stereotype. […]

[Mendoza-Denton 2008] suggests that the indexical meaning of these forms in their use as discourse markers not only invites but positively dictates inferencing by the interlocutor (2008: 286) – that is, they are pragmatically salient indexes of subjectivity, of ‘how I am feeling about this,’ that the hearer is expected to be able to interpret because of shared membership in a community of practice.

(445) We can put this in terms proposed by the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981): speakers acquire not languages or variable sociolinguistic markers as such but rather social ‘voices.’ In Bakhtin’s conception, voices merge linguistic form with social intention (1981: 292–293). It is this social intention that Silverstein and Errington see as not only an unavoidable part of the total linguistic fact to be explained but a rich resource for explanation of linguistic form.

 

4 / Ce que l'anthropologie ajoute à la sociolinguistique

Les faits que nous étudions sont tridimensionnels: changement structural (qu'étudie la linguistique historique), communication (qu'étudie la sociolinguistique) et réflexivité ou awareness (qu'étudie l'anthropologie).

(Conclusion, pp. 447-448) What Errington wrote about his model of pragmatic salience over twenty years ago probably still holds true, despite some of the bolder ventures in recent sociolinguistics:

To look for links between structural change and communicative function is nothing new in sociolinguistic analysis, but to invoke a notion of ‘native speaker awareness’ as an explanatory link between the two may be more controversial. (Errington 1988: 19)

It seems to me a formidable but not entirely quixotic goal for linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics working together to try to achieve: not simply to take into account but to try to account for the total linguistic fact.

 

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