Post on 22-Apr-2019
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LSA LI 2017 – Lecture # 4. 17 VII 17
ENREGISTERMENT. Interdiscursivity underlying social indexicality and dynamic conversational role-alignment to/from social identities in the ‘voicing’ (Bakhtin) of selves and others.
At our last session, we entered into the mechanics of how we interlocutors reveal who,
that is, sociologically speaking, what we are in the way of instantiations of social categories and
social groups of which societies are made. Recall how Mr. A and Ms. C develop an interactional
text, a structure of social consequentiality, engaged in “Getting to Know You.” Recall how Mr.
Roy Black as counsel for the defense manipulates Ms. Anne Mercer in a cross-examination
before judge and jury, through which he interactionally co-creates an evasive, non-truth-telling
persona for her according to his “theory of the case” that involves collusion with the complainant
in a sexual assault case. Her formulations of responses to his questions are never good enough
until the very last “Yes” in line 090, the end of the interactional segment, and he does not let her
off the hook in a more and more interactionally intrusive and challenging way. In the details of
an unfolding denotational text-in-context are thus figurated the identities and interactional-
textual projects of the participants, their apparent goals in the interaction. Both deictics
(indexical referentials) and social indexicals that are elements of pragmatic paradigms are
centrally involved, as these are metricalized into chunkings or segmentations of the phases of
discursive space-time. Interactional participants come to instantiate, then, to materialize aspects
of social identities we know from our experience of living ourselves as social categories and as
members of social groups. (It is important to recall here Max Weber’s fundamental distinction,
central to all serious work in sociolinguistics: categories are partitions of social space into kinds;
groups are aggregates of people with an intuition – perhaps consciousness – of mutual belonging.
Recall the notion of primary, secondary, …, n-ary, … ‘reference groups’, of course, as
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sociologists term them, the groups at various degrees of centrality in one’s life as a member of
which one identifies. Some of our variationist friends have now started using the term
“communities of practice” to identify one kind of group, organized around co-participation, but it
does no serious conceptual work, alas.) How do we index our age, sex, socio-economic position,
among social categories, schemata of social differentiation of a population? How do we index
our generation [≠ demographic cohort/age!], gender identity, class consciousness or class
aspiration, ethnic affiliation, among social groups in society, those resting on a sense of
belonging, however centrally or peripherally? [Slide 1] All such non-denotational, social
indexicals – what Levinson and others misname “social deixis” – such as have been studied in
variationist sociolinguistic analysis, get their indexical value as moments in a dialectic process in
which an essentially ideological “ethno-metapragmatics,” a locally relevant, sometimes even
verbally explicit cultural evaluation of how indexicals work as they do, plays a key role. (My
paper on "Indexical order..." in _Lg & Comm_ 23(3-4).2003 lays this all out with numerous
examples.) Such ethno-metapragmatic knowledge takes the form of intuitive and sometimes
explicit knowledge of registers, on which today we want to focus attention.
To be sure, “languages” are socio-cultural objects, no matter what is claimed by the
mystical pseudo-biology or arm-chair psychology of much linguistic theory. Languages are
manifest only insofar they are immanent in events of denotational communication. Recall the
components of the communicative event, in which internally parsable message indexically
presumes upon a code or grammar, among other aspects of the context. (While much cultural
semiosis exists beyond language, note the specific focus on denotation that is the hallmark of the
cultural objects properly to be called languages.) As indexically presupposed and behaviorally
manifest norms, languages are best thought of as fuzzy-boundaried envelopes of denotational
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code, with reference to the forms of which people conceptualize what it is they are talking about
or representing in the world (referring and modally predicating; “saying ‘something’,” in ethno-
metapragmatic folk vocabulary) and on what basis their interlocutors are, to whatever degree,
understanding them. (This is what we mean by the notion that users of a ‘language’ orient to
norms of form and denotational content, however inflected for particular contexts.) [Slide 2] A
language in this sense is, of course, an ensemble, a logical union for each of its users, of all its
context-appropriate and -effective registers, understood ways of “saying ‘the same thing’” in
denotationally equivalent but formally distinct ways. As students of the social life of language,
we know additionally that such register structures are cross-cut as well by much indexical
variance not yet enregistered and so in a certain sense escaping the native users’ metapragmatic
intuition or radar, but which we can observe nonetheless to be systematic and not merely
random. (Think here of Susan Ervin-Tripp’s pragmatic paradigm of alternative ‘mand’ forms,
each particular to a contextual setting involving ‘power’ or ‘deference entitlement’ and
‘solidarity’ or ‘intimacy’ of within- vs. outside-of- group boundaries.) Every language is shot
through with non-denotational indexical variance just as every language, for its users, is an
envelope of enregisterment.
A linguistic register is an evaluative measure in respect of a stretch of discourse – a
verbal TEXT, as it were, as entextualized – the intuitively understood coherence of which rests
precisely along the dimension of being appropriate to and indicative of the particular
interactional contexts in which it has occurred or could occur. It’s the coherence and
congruence of context-signaling indexicalities across the stretch of discourse that makes a text
register-conforming or register-violating. (This is distinct from logical coherence, note, and
distinct from grammatical conformity-to-parsable system-sentencehood. Denotational text is
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made up of text-sentences and their fragments, recall, real-socio-spatio-temporal objects that
occur in discursive-interactional context.) We feel this register coherence of appropriateness-to
and effectiveness-in context – and we react to its violation – whether such appropriateness
to/effectiveness in context is defined by who is doing the communicating, to whom the
communication is directed or before whom it occurs, or any other way we can characterize a
context as a social site for use of the language code.
The register concept corresponds to and names, as a metalinguistic label, the empirical
fact that everywhere it has been investigated, the users of language conceptualize how language
varies by context as “different [context-indicating] ways of [denotationally] saying ‘the same’
thing” or [illocutionarily] performing ‘the same’ kind of social act by speaking, where the forms
used can differ at whatever plane and level of analysis – pronunciation, vocabulary, turn-of-
phrase. [Slide 3] He went to the eye-doctor vs. He consulted his ophthalmologist. Sit down!
vs. Might I ask that you please be seated? [fɔ:ᵊθ flɔ:] vs. [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ], as I am now pointing out
to you in a register appropriate to my role at this occasion, “as we have already encountered in
Professor Labov’s pioneering work on New York City sociolinguistic variation.”
Such isolable differences of usable linguistic form constitute for the users a (sometimes
gradient) set of alternative indexical signs, signs pointing to normatively distinct contextual
conditions; in short, the differences of form along this dimension of cultural meaning
constituting an indexically loaded or PRAGMATIC PARADIGM. [Slide 4] Speakers have intuitions
– sometimes even explicit normative stipulations – of how elements of several such
paradigmatically differentiated indexes can appropriately – congruently and coherently – co-
occur across textual stretches, and this congruence of indexicality – recall, pointing to similar or
at least non-incoherent social chracteristics of the context – lands them in the same register.
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Such principles of textual compatibility define for the users a DENOTATIONAL-TEXTUAL
REGISTER of their language, an intuition (and, in the cases of standardization resulting, for
example, in style manuals, a stipulation) of which textual elements go together with which
others, and which ought to be excluded from textual co-occurrence or occurrence altogether –
save for producing (bringing about or entailing) special effects by sudden violation that calls
attention to itself (and inevitably to the social dynamics of the communicative situation). You
recall the gently sexist old joke about the debutante arriving for the cotillion who, getting out of
the limousine arranged for the evening – compare the plot of Cinderella – yells out, [Slide 5]
“Oh, Shit! I just stepped in some doggie-do!” Expletives tend to be register – if not also gender
– benders. (Note how the first, off-color expression is a ‘response cry’ [Goffman] that
conventionally performs momentary affect; the cutesy-register denotational phrase doggie do
part of debutante-ish ways of denoting nasty or unpleasant things [R. Lakoff].) Registers are in
essence languages – ways to say what you want to say about the world – that are indexically
particular to context because they are indexically diagnostic of such a context, whether in
positive or negative stipulation. So if one adds up all the registers in a language community,
that is, as shown in the Venn diagram of [Slide 2], if one performs the set-theoretic union of all
the elements of all registers in a community, sociolinguistically viewed, thus constitutes the
inclusive envelope of the community’s ‘language’. Not everyone in the language community
controls all the registers that intersect in the population; we frequently recognize many registers
and can even decode an indexical value – what’s this usage revealing about social context? – for
many of them – think of technical registers like this one! – even if we cannot produce
enregistered text ourselves that passes muster as register-coherent. (Recall here Labov’s Lower
East Side folks – whom we will engage again next time – whose own everyday usage was very
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far from standard, but who were hair-trigger sensitive to the shibboleths of standard register:
aspirational identity among the socially mobile to make it to the Upper Middle Class, as he
analyzed it. Educational institutions – University of Chicago, anyone? – try to inculcate in the
young reverence for various disciplinary technical registers, too, with varying degrees of success
in creating such anxiety. I dutifully copy-edit students’ and colleague’ work according to
academic expository register ideals.)
All registers, not just standard ones, emerge from folk models, projections of linguistic
variation organized in people’s consciousness around REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS, the most salient
anchors of being “in register,” but providing unconscious intuitions of indexical – context-
indicating – coherence in discourse. For language, the idea is that there is a mode of folk-
consciousness (an ethno-metapragmatics) of linguistic variability that organizes such variability
by positing the existence of distinct, indexically contrastive ways of saying what counts as “the
same thing,” i.e., communicating the same denotational content over intervals of text that differ
as to their appropriateness to and effectiveness in conceptualized contexts of use (recall our
examples in American English in [Slide 3] above). These contexts may be defined along any of
the usual sociolinguistic dimensions describing who communicates with what forms to whom
about whom/what where and under what institutional conditions. Register shibboleths serve as
stipulative anchors as salient pillars of co-occurrence in specific contexts for other, less salient
areas of denotational textual form. Language users may pay less explicit attention to non-
shibboleths, but all the while they systematically use them in regular contextualizing ways we
can study from corpora of language sorted on the basis of context of usage. We can even study
regularities of enregisterment cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. Everywhere, registers of
‘honorification’, for example, ways of communicating so as to perform an act of deference to the
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Receiver of the message, to the message’s Audience, and/or to the Referent being communicated
about in the message – all these kinds of systems and their overlaps are attested – tend to focus
ideological attention on, and thus make register shibboleths of, subtle distinctions, as shown in
[Slide 6], among deictics of (“second” or “third”) person (in French shall I say tu or vous?), on
personal proper names, as in American English (Professor Silverstein or Mikey?) and other
address terms derived from status nominal (pop vs. father; doc vs. Dr. Smith), and verbs
predicating ‘transfers’ of things, including messages (hence, metapragmatic verbs like ‘promise’
and ‘request’ as well as “donatory” [S. Martin 1964:408] ones like ‘give to’/‘transfer
to’/‘proffer’/‘bestow upon’), though much more is involved in using what people evaluate as
well-formed honorific discourse. (How many people fluently use, but couldn’t consciously put
their finger on, the intuitively clear distinction I cited earlier, “Sit down!” in what we term the
zero-inflection imperative vs. “Might you please be seated?” with reverently modalized agentless
passive form?)
In European languages, indexes of “honorification” have indeed been saliently
enregistered around second-person personal deictic usage, form of terms of address, and certain
formulae for mands/requests/orders, but many other indexically loaded variants within pragmatic
paradigms concurrently operate at many different planes of language so long they compatibly co-
occur with the more salient shibboleths. It was Roger Brown & his – in those days, secret –
partner, Albert Gilman who created the field of research in address terms as register shibboleths,
though they knew nothing of the concepts of register, of shibboleths as anchors thereof, etc. In
the very same volume of 1960 as Jakobson’s “Linguistics and poetics,” at the very same
Bloomington conference on style in 1958, in fact, Brown & Gilman formulated a theory of
indexicality – again, a concept they knew nothing about – in their paper, “The pronouns of power
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and solidarity.” [Recall Lecture # 3, Slide 4] They interviewed many Europeans about to whom
one says “T” or “V” – again, committing the ethno-metapragmatic error of trying to define
speech acts as essentially agentive moves made by a Sender to a Receiver. Here, in-and-by using
“T” as opposed to “V” when denoting the Addressee, i.e., when the roles of Addressee and
Referent are filled by the same individual (so note the indexical denotation as well as the social
indexicality), there is a pragmatic paradigm, an indexical contrast, of what seems to be indexed
in-and-by the use of the one or the other. They model the social relation of the two individuals
as one of a ‘power’ relationship – A has power over B iff A has some sort of control over B –
which is asymmetric; or of a ‘solidarity’ relationship – A and B are solidary iff A and B share
some characteristic – which is symmetric. It would be nice if use of “T” indexes power of
Speaker over Addressee and use of “V” indexes solidarity between Speaker and Addressee. But
things don’t really work that way. Over fifty years of research have been launched by this paper,
the whole sociolinguistic field of “politeness studies” via studying terms of address. People have
tried breaking down the power and solidarity relationships into sets of status types: older kin vs.
younger kin; employer vs. employee; noble vs. commoner; higher-status occupational identity
vs. lower-status one; etc. People have noted that different institutional situations are associated
with “T” usage vs. “V” usage: we call our colleagues by first name in direct address but by
Title+Surname or Surname in organizational meetings and in print. Still, how these forms in fact
operate indexically – as opposed to how they constitute ethno-metapragmatic register shibboleths
– is not clear from such work.
[EXCURSUS: In fact, there are three situations of use that can only be seen – and B&G
show this on their chart – if we look at adjacency pair-parts: this reveals symmetric T;T and V;V
and asymmetric T;V/V;T. The real dynamic figuration here is ‘closeness’ and ‘distance’. To see
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this, let’s go back to the communicative-event—based chart of denotational types. Recall that in
denotational function-sub-one, each act of referring is picking out a single individual as referent.
Thus, for an individual who would self-denote at column C, referring to an individual who
“literally” – note the presumption – would denote the Addressee at column F, instead uses a form
at column H or – as in Italian – column K, or even – as in the indigenous American Native
language Yokuts – G has performed an act of formal distantiation in the denotational plane, that
figurates as social distantiation, that is, speaking across some kind of social divide. Thus, V;V
situations are situations of formality and public-communication (“publicity” the state of
something being among a public, as Habermas would say), the extreme status-conscious
communicating-at-a-distance one from another; T;T situations are situations of intimacy and in-
group-ness of all kinds, whether status-derived and perduring, or momentary, such as being stuck
in an elevator for several hours or, as B&G point out, having survived a harrowing trip up a
mountain together; T;V and V;T are the interesting cases of adjacency pairs. Note that the first
offers intimate lack of reference to status and other such differentials in the first pair-part,
followed by a corrective distantiation; B&G take their subjects’ subjectivities on this score, and
would gloss it as ‘speaking down from superior power to inferior’ followed by ‘speaking up
from inferior power to superior’, and the other ordering as the reverse. One can see that the
crucial pair-part is the second, in each instance, the one that indexes (re)establishment or
recognition of perhaps already existing social distance/difference or the neglect of it. I think that
the ‘power’ dimension emerges as an ethno-metapragmatic intuition made explicit that status-
inferiors must always perform distance to a status-superior, and status-superiors can presume
upon such asymmetry to the extent they do not emphasize it – noblesse oblige.
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Like J. L. Austin stubbing his denotationalist toe on explicit primary performative
utterances, Brown & Gilman happened upon honorific register shibboleths of great salience in
European ethno-metapragmatics of agentive “etiquette,” the personal deictic paradigms for
referring-to one’s interlocutory Addressee and at the same time setting the tone of the social
relationship between Speaker and Addressee. Note the performative act here: Speaker’s usage of
“T” or “V” is seen as an index of recognition of a particular quality of interpersonal social
relationship between Speaker and Addressee, ones that B&G dub ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’.
(We’ve already seen these in the syntactic paradigm of ‘mands’ in Ervin-Tripp’s “Is Sybil
there?” recall [Lecture # 3, Slide 3].) As a performative, the question is “uptake:” what will
erstwhile Addressee do in a second adjacency pair-part so as to ratify or contest or whatever the
erstwhile Speaker’s little performative act? You can see that, from the analytic point of view, (a)
an interpersonal social relationship is the contextual condition being indexed, so we need to see
what kinds of schemata of social differentiation are associated with what kinds of usage. There
are lots of bases of ‘power’, just as there are many reasons why one would feel ‘solidary’ with
someone else; (b) only in adjacency pair-parts do the three possibilities of usage emerge: (T;T);
(V;V); (T/V;V;T) [two symmetrical, one asymmetric]. But there are too few choices in the
binary paradigm – “T” vs. “V” in someone’s turn-at-talk – to capture this; (c) yet the ethno-
metapragmatic view is that the agentive Speaker is merely registering a prior context that,
paradoxically, is made salient in the here-and-now precisely by this little ritual act (note how all
ritual operates!). So ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ are B&G’s translations of lots of research subjects’
expressions of what is going on here, rather than an adequate model of how the social
indexicality operates here. They’ve reduced the dialectic to one of its moments, in which “V” =
‘power’ and “T” = ‘solidarity’, essentially.]
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To study such a phenomenon as honorification, one needs both to look at usage and to
understand what the natives are experiencing via an ethno-metapragmatic model. The situation
seems to be this, then. For denoting a single Addressee, one would expect a T-like grammatical
form. Note that every V-like grammatical form substituted for such, no matter what language we
are dealing with, deflects or “distances” the Addressee tropically from the expected and hence
from where the Speaker’s denotational category would land on our chart of denotational
category-types. (Note the precise parallel to a topology – here a tropological topology! – of
“here” and “there”; in fact the Japanese ethno-metapragmatic theory is ‘inside’ uchi – ‘outside’
soto, with the imaginary wall of enclosure of one or both of the participants noted as the ethno-
metapragmatic metaphor.) The trope of distance is universal, and can be ratified in a second
adjacency pair-part or not, as the case may be; or can be instituted in a second adjacency pair-
part, even, with the same effect of responding to a friendly “Hi, there!” with a frosty and
contrastively emphatic subject and verb in assertorial do-supported form, “How do you do?”
(Note how greeting routines always function to set up the conditions under which any further
interaction can occur.) But the ethno-metapragmatic model draws together intuitions of, say,
“formality” – recall your French or Spanish or German teacher? – perhaps because in
circumstances of public usage, the mutual (V;V) is where one starts if one knows nothing of
one’s interlocutor, or of “informality” – perhaps because one relaxes with “intimates,” even
transient ones, with (T;T). And the ethno-metapragmatic model seems to see the entire system
as focused on honorification of Addressee, paying deference where deference is due, keeping
one’s distance by distancing Addressee (we cannot forget that in the functional1 plane of
denotation, the personal deictic does, after all, refer to the Addressee, coloring all intuitions
about what “T”-ing and “V”-ing must be about, in the folk mind). But note that in the B&G
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model any single use of “T” or “V” is uninterpretable as lying in the ‘power’ dimension or the
‘solidarity’ one. In fact, importantly, these turn out to be summaries of tropically aligned
structures of social relations, brought together as tropes by a kind of analogical or diagrammatic
logic precisely as in any ritual structure: status-higher [interlocutory Alter] : status-lower [int.
Alt] :: unfamiliar [int. Alt] : familiar [int. Alt], instantiated in any number of realms in addition to
personal deictic usage.
Now here’s the irony of the dialectical way this operates: [Slide 7] those expecting to
receive more “V” relative to interactional others in particular contexts also tend strategically to
maximize the use of “V,” in essence turning the T/V opposition into an index of Speaker
distinction-in-society. (Janet Morford’s study [J. Ling. Anth. ca. 1998] of French T/V usage –
among the so-called “egalitarian” “generation of ’68!” -- bears this out, as do new studies of
Germany and Sweden by a transnational research team.) So there is an emergent second-order
of indexicality here! “V” is as “V” does. Be reluctant to (T;T) and index your own “V”-
worthiness.
We see this with stunning clarity in so-called “speech-level” phenomena with such a rich
ethno-metapragmatics in Japanese, Javanese, Thai, Tibetan, etc., as well as in diglossic language
communities with a functionally split denotational norm, into a script-and-graphic – hence also
lectorial – “H” and a conversational vernacular “L.”
In languages like Japanese, Javanese, Tibetan, etc., honorification is enregistered around
the density of special lexical items, usage of which constitutes a performance of deference-to-
addressee and/or deference-to-referent. [Slide 8] The number of such indexically special lexical
items within contrastive paradigms of indexical value differs as a function of the particular
area of denotation one is communicating about in-and-by the use of a member of that set –
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many Javanese sets, for example, have only two members; second-person deixis seems to
include at least five, and perhaps more, contrastive forms – so such registers are gradient affairs,
the co-occurrence of some shibboleths of which have, rising to consciousness and explicit
normativity, as well conventionally led to ethno-metapragmatic names (see Errington 1988;
Silverstein 1979; 2003).
[Slides 9, 10] The ethno-metapragmatic model that Clifford Geertz figured out from
talking with prijaji consultants, the old royal court elites, and from reading native manuals of
usage, is a linear concept of lexical registers of more and more “refinement” (‘alus-ness), the
opposite of basic Javanese “Ngoko,” which is “unrefined” or “coarse” (kasar). Note the
essentialization involved: in systems of honorification, those whose inner souls are ‘alus
(bespeaking deference entitlement, to be sure) must be addressed with a level of ‘alus lexicon
appropriate-to that refinement. Geertz catches the basic binary of Ngoko:Krama, and the half-
way house of Madja ‘middle’ for those with limited ability in Krama. But he is hard-pressed to
explain the profusion of elements in certain usage that seems to complicate matters since the
very same lexical elements seem to occur both in Ngoko, “raising” it somehow, and in Krama,
“raising” it even more. The ethno-metapragmatic idea is that one adjusts one’s level of usage to
the needs of the interlocutor – the ADDRESSEE, that is – along the kasar to ‘alus scale, according
to the ‘alus-ness or kasar-hood of the interlocutor’s batin, ineffable inner essence.
Here is what is going on in the way of enregisterment of indexicality. [Slide 11] There
are three and a half indexical systems for deference-paying, each marked variant opposed to
Ngoko in its own functional2 way. Note that some syntactic constructions will use lexical forms
that have not only a Ngoko:Krama indexical variance [Speaker deference-to-Addressee], but a
Ng:KInngil [Speaker deference-to-Referent] and/or a Ng:KAndhap [Speaker estimate that
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Agentive Subject Referent normatively pays deferernce-to-Patientive Recipient/Benefactee]
variance possible as well. Hence there are, for any area of denotation, anywhere from one to five
different forms, depending on how that area of denotation is or is not swept up into these various
indexicalities.
For some examples, like the one that Geertz used or Errington, several of these systems can
operate simultaneously, focusing everything in fact on the honorification of the Addressee in
native ethno-metapragmatic theory.
But ‘alus is as ‘alus does: the more you can subtly perform these indexical systems, the more you
index yourself as deserving of them yourself as interlocutory partner! Note the ironic reversal of
precisely who is the focus of the system, in relation to ethno-metapragmatic ideology.
The key point about enregistered forms, especially certain register shibboleths, such as
those of standard registers and their negations, and many others, is that they become EMBLEMS
OF IDENTITY of their characteristic users within differentiated social orders (that is, within the
conventions of a language community, naturalized iconic indexicals of stereotypical categories
of persons [see Agha 2007:190-232]). We fashion – or, if you will, we “style” – ourselves as
identifiable social types through the control of a repertoire of registers and especially of their
shibboleths. Such emblems of identity, deployable as such in deliberate self-fashioning usage,
and endowed with all this naturalizing ideological infusion, are the indexical foci of now
intentionally performable identities – the Judith Butler kind of identities – that is, identities
indexically entailed in-and-by the use of certain language forms. “Oh! This person speaks like a
…” – fill in whatever identity you want. When, some 25 years back, I spoke to the guy in charge
of the fish counter at my local supermarket in basic academic standard, he immediately asked
me, “You a professor or sometin’?” (And, until his unforeseen death a couple of years ago, he
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always introduced me to other personnel as “the professor,” and addressed me as such, an
identity I have not been able to escape half way across town.) Language use creates the image,
as Shaw and then Lerner & Lowe so wonderfully illustrated. This is the very paragon of
performativity, the performativity of identities in-and-by the use of particular enregistered forms,
where the effect requires only that certain salient shibboleths of identity-conferring register be
displayed to the interpreting consciousness for the rest to be interpreted in conformance to the
salient.
I hope that you are beginning to see that the register perspective – the universal
perspective of users of language on the contextual variability of their language as denotational
code – is a social fact composed of three interlocked factors as seen in [Slide 12]: One is the
existence of pragmatic or indexical paradigms, forms that contrast by the particular context they
index or point to. A second is the notion of congruent co-occurrence in discourse, where certain
paradigmatic forms seem to set expectations about the discourse unfolding over a stretch of
verbal (in this case) behavior, in short over an indexically cohesive text. And the third is the folk
understanding of the social meaning or value of the register shibboleths and thence of the register
itself within a language community. People are differently invested in the way register
shibboleths and thence registers ought to inform their usage and the usage of others. As we will
see in Labov’s example with standardization, this distribution of people’s investment can itself
frequently be sociologically characterized. (You will recall that he found a distribution roughly
by socioeconomic class and aspiration for upward mobility within a class structure.) And
people’s ideas of what are, in fact, the registers with respect to which they produce and interpret
usage may themselves differ as a function of where people are located in social structures;
people of different social condition are differently mobilized to structures of enregisterment –
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sometimes not at all – as sociolinguistic variationists were astonished to discover at the
peripheries of relevantly ethno-metapragmaticizing social formations. Think, then, of the power
of educational organizations in this regard, as agents of nation-state projects, to draw the
peripheral young, already perfectly fluent speakers of one or more vernaculars, into anxieties of
enregisterment before a state-sponsored standard register of one language, declaring this to be
the entrance ticket to the socioeconomic and social mobility suggested by the conical model of
standardization we will study in next class session. Before and after pictures: before, happy-go-
lucky, perhaps even polyglot kid; after, anxiety-riven asymmetric bilingual, who intuitively
understands the lessons of the cone of stratification around the state’s language standard.
As this example demonstrates, enregisterment, the spread of a register structure in a
population, is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning – indexical meaning –
and value to in this instance language signs, transforming people’s intuitions and perceptions
both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts – cohesively arrayed material
signs – are produced and interpreted. And you don’t have to be a government or para-state
organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to think of as their
personal – even individual – style. What is reflexively true of language in this way is also true of
every other meaningful code of culture. Cultural meaning of everything in its social context
emerges in this way via enregisterment: in-and-by being able to “do things” – engage in
consequential social action – with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural stuff, the
fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures defines what
the social context is, and who – recall: what social kind of person – is acting in that context. And
language is, in fact, the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes come to be
17
enregistered; language – discourse – always has the potential to give ideologically conforming
shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural code.
Even very local-scale languages with small numbers of users have registers such as those
used in rituals of certain kinds, and honorific or taboo registers, gender registers, age-grade
registers, etc. In the First World and its vast post-colonial culture area, the nation-state form of
political organization has heavily invested in the enregisterment of standards, which, massively
undergirded by a political economy of social stratification, have come to define for many
language users what a “language” is all about. If it has no graphically manifest standard register
with all the paraphernalia and practices of enforcement, denotational code envelopes just do not
seem to be real, full “languages.” “Dialects” or “jargons,” perhaps; but not “languages!” (This
is a remark I constantly get when I tell people that I study the indigenous languages of North
America and of Aboriginal Australia. People are even skeptical of the possibility that I created
phonologically adequate segmental alphabets and taught native speakers to use them, since these
are only “dialects!”) The institutional condition of standardization informing the envelope of
enregisterment is, to be sure, increasingly common, but is hardly essential to the nature of
language as such. But since enregisterment is a sociolinguistic fact that involves the meta-
semiotic engagement of indexical variance by the very users of denotational code, like all
“ideological” facts, it can vary over a population as a function of people’s very different
involvement with the chronotopy of use in events of communication.
As I have written about elsewhere, [Slide 13] cultural phenomena exist as assemblages
the three aspects of which are: indexical signification at various sites of social semiosis —
intersemiotic circulation across sites that, in effect, cite one another insofar they invoke the same
ethno-metapragmatic — and propulsive emanation of such networked intersemiosis from in-
18
effect central sites of value-creation, as our last, extended example of talanoa in Bhatgaon will
reveal. What is meaningful – indexically significant – at some site of sociality exists in a
network of intersemiotic relations that brings about an imaginary of chronotopic movement, or
“circulation” of forms and/or meanings; and such circulation is not random, but emanates from
certain central sites as nodes of network connectivity, such circulating emanations intersecting in
particular sites simultaneously caught, as it were, in their semiotic field of force. So it is with
denotational codes or languages. The very envelope of enregisterment that defines the
inclusiveness of contextualized language-in-use may well – in fact, inevitably does – vary as a
function of the geographical spread of the community of users, and multiple local variant norms
of a certain stability emerge – let us call them local standards of enregisterment – in each of the
various islands defining the overall archipelago of a language. Emanating from each of these is a
value-conferring signification to particular register alternants, the force of which spreads such
signification though it intersects at certain sites and competes with the signification
interdiscursively emerging from elsewhere.
As we will be elaborating in our next session, given the long history of the association of
standardization, in Euro-American and, thence, in more recent post-colonial contexts, with
inscriptional techniques of writing and printing, Bloomfield (1927) spoke of folk concepts of
“language” and “dialect,” i.e., standard and non-standard registers, in folk terms of “literate” and
“illiterate” speech. Standardization has long been a class-focused project of political economic
centrality to modern mass social formations, and was embraced by governments among the
techniques of forging the modernist nation-state by projecting a language community (as
standardized) into a polity, thereby creating fringe or marginal members and excluding those
who resisted membership or had divided loyalties. See Silverstein 1985; 1996 [1987]; 1997;
19
1998; 2000; 2010 and references cited there on language community, speech community, the
cultural politics of standardization, etc.
Our seeing standardization as a mode of ‘enregisterment’ with consequences for norms
within a language community builds on the Reid (1956)—McIntosh—Halliday (1964) precedent
in the use of the term ‘register’. [Slide 14] The term alludes to the pipe-organ, where different
registers provide distinct timbral envelopes for what is otherwise precisely the same melodic
sequence of pitch-over-time. The organ is basically a set of resonating tubes through which air is
pumped; the different lengths and diameters of the pipes determine the pitch, the frequency of
the sound. The amount of air determines the loudness, the amplitude of the noise. An
unobstructed pipe gives off a neutral whistle-sound. But if you want to change the timbral
qualities – so that the sound mimics other kinds of noise-makers, like bells, string instruments,
deeply resonating instruments, a xylophone or similar percussion instrument, etc., you add
various obstructions to the flow of air out of the organ pipes; these are called the different
timbral registers. Note that pitch and loudness are the same across registers. In the same way,
the idea is, we can communicate the same denotational content in two or more ways by
formulating the message in more than one register.
For language, the idea is that there is a mode of folk-consciousness (an ethno-
metapragmatics) of “superposed” (Gumperz) indexical variability that posits the existence of
distinct, indexically contrastive ways of saying what counts as “the same thing,” i.e.,
communicating the same denotational content over intervals of text-precipitating discourse that
differ as to their appropriateness to and effectiveness in conceptualized contexts of use. These
contexts may be defined along any of the usual sociolinguistic dimensions describing who
20
communicates with what forms to whom about whom/what where and under what institutional
conditions.
Language users, as we noted, evaluate discourse with intuitive metrics of coherence of
enregistered features of form co-occurring across such stretches, generally focusing on highly
salient ‘register shibboleths’ that reveal a basic register setting around which cluster the
compatibility or lack of compatibility of other aspects of usage.
Variationist sociolinguistics originally developed by measuring senders’ overall
performance of language correlated as a function of their demographic characteristics, their
macro-sociological classifiability into categories, and what we might term the task demands of
the context of production. Variation, moreover, quickly became identified with degree of
difference in what speakers utter measured from an ethno-metapragmatically valorized standard
register, toward which form, in certain areas of the space of variability, they could be shown to
move in their production under certain standard-inducing task demands, such as reading aloud
from a printed page (as opposed to conversing unawares with intimates). It quickly became clear
that variability does not depend only on the existence of standard register as an anchor-point, and
that simple demographic characterizations of speakers were inadequate as the independent
variables of any explanatory scheme. It is a long story, but suffice it to say that so-called “third
wave variationism,” as it is termed by Professor Eckert, has been trying to come to grips with
these facts by studying not merely aggregate performance measures per subject and per
population, but more carefully contextualized performance measures where a single individual
may display characteristic modes of indexical self-presentation under different interactional
conditions, that is, in different communicative contexts. Third-wave variationism, that is, has
been discovering the semiotics of indexicality.
21
The interesting point here is that once one approaches sociolinguistic variability in this
way, it becomes apparent, as shown in [Slide 15] that [1] so-called linguistic variables cannot be
studied except as members of pragmatic paradigms; [2] such pragmatic paradigms are organized
along dimensions of contrast stipulated by ethno-metapragmatic understandings, perhaps even
partially revealed by explicit metapragmatic discourse; [3] certain elements of diverse pragmatic
paradigms are compatible one with another, such that they tend to co-occur in actual discourse,
producing the effect of constituting a distinct register; and [4] people experience linguistic
variability in this enregistered mode, save for certain register shibboleths that have become so
stereotyped as to be performable with indexical value as illocutionary forms, the production of
which serves to create identity, etc.
Studying a register is studying a language fixed by some contextual indexicality. A
register is the sum total of all linguistic form that is associable with the use of language in a
definable context. Registers of a language are different ways of “saying the same thing” in the
folk-view of how language works (even though Saussure teaches us that this is an impossibility).
So if there are different ways of “saying the same thing,” then we can compare how to say
something in one register with how to say it in another.
Of course, this folk view of the situation is, characteristically, inaccurate in many
respects, but we need not give a theoretical critique at this time. You cannot really “say exactly
the same thing” in two registers very easily. Imagine doing science without any technical
terminology for key conceptual points of theory! But we might ask, what is the functional
criterion of register? Why do alternative registers exist? How do registers influence each other
within language, so that they grow and extend their reach, seeming to create what some people
term “metaphorical” ways of talking about the world? (At any given moment of history, what is
22
understood by users of a language to be “metaphorical” and what “literal” is, in fact, contingent
on the register-structure of a language community. We will see this for oinoglossia, wine-talk
register, in a bit.) The answer to all this is that registers are the way that nondenotational
indexicality functions within the universe of a group’s culture, and the concept of register allows
us to examine how people become agentive actors with respect to that indexicality, however
much, because of “limits of awareness” I’ve written about 35 years ago, they see that
indexicality through the lens of denotational forms (hence, alternative ways of “saying the same
thing”).
Semiotically, registers are always caught in the processes of enregisterment and
disenregisterment. In enregisterment they form as ways of speaking (Whorf: “fashions of
speaking”) around incorporated indexicals and thus becoming coherently register-like. During
the early 1960s a Chomskian linguistic register came into existence based on how logicians did
what they called logical syntax, indexing one’s identity as within the fold as a function of how
one used certain terms and expressions and treated examples in a certain way. When George
Lakoff, in his paper on generative semantics – called, appropriately enough, “On generative
semantics” – made a spoof on Noam’s own way of talking about his own “standard” theory in
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Noam was not only opposed to the theory; he was annoyed at
the spoof, which he did not quite understand as a playful uchi (“in group”)-joke. In
disenregisterment, by contrast, the forms in a register moves to normative, union-of-all-registers
common status in a language, for example losing context-specific indexical value, like the
former trademark products Kleenex, Frigidaire, Xerox becoming common nouns, losing their
indexicality within regimes of name-control that necessitated the little “™” sign and the legal
protection bestowed by government. When learnèd Latinate forms of subordinate clause
23
structures calqued into English became mere literary standard, they lost their indexical value of
indicating the Latin learning of their users. In terms of meanings or senses of words and fixed
lexemic expressions, such disenregisterment is perceived as a term becoming common, a
metaphor becoming literalized, etc.
***
To investigate a register? [Slides 16-18]
[1] Find out where it is used; obviously, the people connected with certain sites of social
practice will be peak register users. (Think of academic disciplinary registers, like my
lingo here-and-now.) [John Roemer—Gary Becker incident]
[2] Find out what the discursive genres are in which it characteristically occurs.
Sometimes these will be citational uses, embedding characterization, as in Dickens as
analyzed by Bakhtin, etc.
[3] To analyze the textual structure of this discursive genre, it is necessary to parse
numerous examples of normative or norm-near entextualizations-in-context so as to
discern the shibboleths and other formal features that signal that one is “in register” (like
being “in key” or “in tune” in music). Note the importance of pragmatic or indexical
paradigms: why does someone use such-and-such form instead of one we might expect at
a certain place? (Recall Mr. A’s elaborate place- and institution-name routines; we’ll see
Gov. Palin’s usage in a bit.)
[4] Follow the intertextualities (interdiscursivity) into different kinds of contexts [by
topic, by speaker, by situation, etc.]; as it turns out, the fluent production of these kinds of
texts has a top-and-center social site of production from which enregisterment emanates.
For my studies of what I’ve dubbed oinoglossia ‘wine talk’, about which we’ll talk more,
24
those in the wine industry, professional connoisseurs, avocational connoisseurs, etc.,
males over females, an age-class-mobility distribution, so those with pretensions to class
position over others, etc., are the loci of value-production. The remarkable thing is, the
technical terms are rigidly ordered into textual structure in actual oinoglossic usage,
whereas for those at a remove from the peak sites of usage, it is just the words, the lexical
forms with their specialized, mysterious meanings that seem to be what oinoglossia
consists of – in other words, no longer a full text-forming register but merely a set of
special words with indexical value. These are what those truly ignorant of wine-talk, but
with a desire to use it for indexical purposes, use all the wrong lexemes. (Remember
Monsieur Jourdain?) Thurber’s 1930’s parody: “It is a naïve little country burgundy, but
I think you will be amused by its pretensions.”
[5] Observe how lexically-focused registers especially, like oinoglossia, are aggressive in
creating pragmatic metaphors – icons, i.e., diagrams of social identities consubstantial
with the forms that index them – that become the basis for the conceptualization of
enregisterment and interdiscursive pragmatic metaphorization, as we have seen for
Second Wave Feminist reforms, and we will see illustrated for oinoglossia. In order to
become a prestige comestible, a product must attract – marketing and advertising people
know this! – tasting notes. Wine is the generative pragmatic-metaphorical center of this
whole mode of contemporary English.
But let’s look at a register in action in social context, jangli bat ‘jungle talk’ Hindi in village Fiji.
Indo-Fijian factionalism in an “occasionally egalitarian” society
Let’s take a look at how several factors – the intersection of register and genre, and their
characteristic distributions in the overall communicative economy – are manifested in Hindi-
25
speaking village Fiji, where two registers in particular are diametrically opposed in local
evaluation and distribution. [Slide 4]
Don Brenneis (1974; 1978; 1984a; 1984b; 1987; 1988; 1990) provides us with material that
is extremely useful for conceptualizing the political realm of Hindi-speaking Fiji, the village
he calls Bhatgaon in Fiji, populated by descendents of people recruited to overseas
indentured labor in the once-English colony. This is what Brenneis (1987) terms an
“occasionally egalitarian community,” where a mutual respect for independence is coupled
with few mechanisms for direct, coercive political control. In such an environment, it is
interesting that conflicts of interests do, in fact, get resolved by a kind of oscillating or
dialectical mechanism of what we might call a negative and a positive ritual form of political
action.
The positive ritual site is easy to discern: it is the pancayat, or council of formal presentation
of grievances for one or another side of disputes, of clashing interests, of construals of issues
that find themselves in radical conflict. The pancayat is a formally organized oratorical
occasion convened by those called bada admi, the “big men,” at which formal speeches on
behalf of interests are delivered, in a rhetorically fashioned register of Fijian Hindi, termed
shudh hindi “sweet Hindi,” which is, as Brenneis reports, “the language of religion, oratory
and public events.” Everything here leads us to understand the pancayat as an orderly
“poetic” of community politics, at which oratorical eloquence is supposed to work its
effective magic. Poetic eloquence is locally expected to be appropriate to this use.
But how do political conflicts ripen, as it were, to the point where they must be savored
through oratorical eloquence in this positive, highly valued ritual site? There is another kind
of event, negatively valued – in fact a kind of anti-ritual form in which and through which
26
issues are defined in a way by gaining adherents to a side. Brenneis describes this kind of
event, the talanoa or men’s “gossip session” in a charming discussion of “grog and gossip”
in the community, Bhatgaon, where he did his ethnographic study.
Small groups of related men gather in early evening in someone’s belo, a thatch-roofed
sitting house on someone’s property, and “have a few,” as we would say in our culture. They
drink yaqona, locally termed “grog,” the mildly narcotic drink that Polynesians term kava in
their ceremonial life. Pleasantly relaxed, though not drunk in any sense as the drinking
proceeds, such a men’s group addresses local issues – news of the day or week, as it were –
in a multi-party conversation. (Talking politics in a neighborhood bar should come to mind
as the nearest urban equivalent in contemporary America.)
Now none of this would be remarkable beyond the sociality of the occasion, except that the
form – the “poetics,” if you will – of the conversational activity and the medium in which it
occurs, draw our interest. Talanoa, male gossip, is rendered in the extreme negative opposite
register of Fijian Hindi from the one used in the pancayat, the ritual occasion of resolution of
issues. It is called jangli bat “jungle talk,” in essence, and it is specifically negatively viewed
in the community, a kind of embarrassment of vernacular masculinity.2
But further. As opposed to the officially prized shudh Hindi of the speechmaker, valued for
“display[ing] a good knowledge of standard Fiji Hindi, a large Sanskritic vocabulary, and a
knack for apposite parables,” jangli bat and its use in talanoa have a clear negative cachet:
“men who excel in it are much appreciated” even though – or should we say because? – it
“focus[es] on stigmatized subjects, using a[n officially] low prestige variety of Hindi” – “at
the same time a source of shame and of rural pride” (Brenneis 1984a:492-93). Real men get
down!
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In the course of their conversation over grog, men move in and out of episodes of talanoa. It
is scandal, potentially embarrassing and to the detriment of someone or some interests, that
forms the content of such talk. Who wants to have been responsible for telling such tales?
Indeed, in a surface egalitarian community, pointed and explicit accusation against particular
others would be very unwise, even in an intimate group of friends and relatives.
So what we find in the transcripts of talanoa sessions that Brenneis has provided is this.
First, there is a low degree of explicit, orderly, and complete descriptive information, the
kind, say, we say we value in expository communication.3 Half-propositions, suggestive
allusions, and so forth, abound: claims made about doings and sayings, but not attributed to
anyone as agent or actor, are the dominant content. We would call this property depleted
referentiality of gossip discourse. Note on the one hand how this depletion figurates
plausible deniability for whoever is uttering it, dishing the dirt, as it were. Note on the other
hand more importantly that this means the addressees of such discourse must already be
considerably “in the know” about the scandalous doings and happenings. [Slide 5] (See the
adjacency pairs 2.4-2.5 on Brenneis’s [1984a:501] transcript, reproduced here for you, as
well as 2.8-2.9.)
There is a threshold of knowledge that is presupposed as an “opportunity cost” of
participation: a good ritual player, even as addressee, is someone who dominates the news.
As Brenneis observes, “The most striking feature of these [talanoa] transcripts is how
difficult it would be to reconstruct the underlying events on the basis of the talanoa texts
themselves. . . . [G]enerally participants in talanoa sessions must come to them with some
understanding of what is being discussed” (Brenneis 1984a:494).
28
So if these sessions are not really informative, what are they? Here, a second aspect of the
form of conversation emerges. Talanoa is marked by “rhythmic and rapid delivery,” the
discourse “divide[d] … into syntactic and rhythmic chunks” of stress units “giving a pulsing
feel to the talanoa as a whole. . . . Assonance and alliteration are quite marked, and
exaggerated intonation contours and volume variation frequently occur.” As well,
“[r]epetition and near repetition of words and phrases are common, as are plays with word
order” and lots of reduplicative forms (e.g., polis-ulis = “police”), exaggerating a tendency of
jangli Hindi. The language is, in short, a poetry like our American English rap or Hip Hop,
in which, even across speaking turns, people have to jump into the rhythm of the talk,
exercising a facility for artistically shaping their own contribution to it.
The time-marker of the verbal beat of this rhythmic delivery is the form bole, structurally
(grammatically) the third person singular present of the verb “to say:” thus, “he/she says.” In
talanoa this form occurs so often it no longer actually means “he/she says”; it has become
what from the perspective of textual organization we call a discourse marker, punctuating
breath-group and other segments of utterance as do like, ya know, ain’ it and so forth in
vernacular American English. “[F]requently stressed and lengthened vis-à-vis the rest of the
text” – which is rapidly delivered in oral performance – it is a kind of phrasal measuring
device that occurs not only in the middle of turns at talk, but especially at the beginnings of
turns and at the ends of turns when its utterance shows that the floor has now become
available for another speaker to jump in. [Slide 6] This is shown very well in 2.12, 2.18-
2.19, 2.20-2.21 in the transcript reproduced from Brenneis (1984a:502).
From the perspective of its meaning, bole is what we term a quotative particle; we might
translate it “they sáy, [pause] (that…)” (extra stress and perhaps rising-falling intonation on
29
say-), with generalized they that has no actual denotational antecedent, or “one héárs [pause]
(that …),” putting the onus for the stench being uttered about someone on the generalized
community, as though indeed Kant’s (cf. Habermas [1989:89-140]) “public opinion” has
informed of the bad tidings.
I like to think of this rap or word-jazz game in the image of a jump-rope round, where
children have to jump out of and into the rhythm of the turning rope without getting fouled
up by stepping on it or by getting hit by it. It requires some skill.
So it is rhythmically co-constructed stylized gab or talk that is occurring in talanoa, not a
good, complete, orderly co-constructed story, but a co-construction of what is not said, a co-
construction of what is mutually presupposable and hence not in need of actual elaboration.
That is the discourse form, whatever the empirical actuality of some participant’s knowing or
not knowing. To participate you must be able to indicate by your own co-construction that
you already know; to participate is to register a mutual alignment with the guy who has
already spoken, taking up the story-to-hand from the perspective emerging in the
intersubjective space of co-construction.
Participation is, in short, a figuration or trope of likeness-of-alignment to the way some
scandal is being formulated. In short, one’s collusion in it – to use the negative word for
collaboration – in fashioning an emergently group-based account is a sign that points to (the
technical language is: indexes) the very coming into being of a potential political faction in
respect of some issue or situation. Talanoa is the negative ritual among small groups of men
where political interests about particular issues come into being, necessitating, as they
persist and ripen – or fester, to use a disease image – the eventual constitution of a pancayat,
the ritual event for airing the social wound and cleansing it.
30
Small-scale egalitarian politics – even “occasionally egalitarian” politics – is factional
politics, the spectral coming-into-being of which causes official anxiety and the search for
remedies.4 Talanoa analyzed as an event of social action with its characteristic poetic form
of participation, gives us the key to how faction comes discursively into being about
particular issues. It may be officially negatively valued and hence denied as part of the
political process – in our own society, the notion that “men don’t gossip” for example – but it
is the very first engine-stroke in the reciprocating system that is the mechanisms in place for
the politics of Bhatgaon and other such communities. Talanoa as an event is a ritual
microcosm of the macro-social form of political faction, which can come into being as men
are drawn into co-constructing a far-from-disinterested account of something with strong
community interest.
So it is rhythmically co-constructed stylized gab or talk that is occurring in talanoa, not a
good, complete, orderly co-constructed story, but a co-construction of what is not said, a co-
construction of what is mutually presupposable and hence not in need of actual elaboration.
That is the discourse form, whatever the empirical actuality of some participant’s knowing or
not knowing. To participate you must be able to indicate by your own co-construction that
you already know; to participate is to register a mutual alignment with the “voicing,” as
Bakhtin (1981, 275-366) would term it, of the guy who has already spoken, taking up the
story-to-hand from the perspective emerging in the intersubjective space of co-construction.
To hear the story in what is being said, you must know the story, and you should be able to
throw in your own little contribution to the emerging skeleton of a story-line to ratify your
right to hear more. One is never actually the Goffmanian (1979) “author” of the details,
moreover; one is merely the “animator” of them in the instance, relaying what, by silent
31
assent in the gossip group, must clearly have been on everyone’s lips in prior conversation
that is at least formally indexed by the quotative particle: “I’m not telling you this, but ...!”
The poetics of participation is, in short, a figuration, a trope, a metaphor – a diagrammatic
icon – of the participants’ likeness-of-alignment to the way some scandal is being narratively
formulated with an intersubjective voice of negative evaluation. In short, one’s collusion – to
use the negative word for collaboration – in fashioning as the “denotational text” an
emergently group-based account with negative evaluational stance indexically counts as
creative co-participation in the very coming into being of a potential political faction in
respect of some issue or situation that will likely face the community as a whole or some
significant interests in it. Talanoa is the negative ritual among small groups of men where
political interests about particular issues come into being, necessitating, as they may in some
cases persist and ripen – or fester, to use a disease image – the eventual constitution of a
pancayat, the ritual event for airing the social wound and cleansing it in its own poetic order
of elegant sweetness.
Small-scale egalitarian politics – even “occasionally egalitarian” politics – is factional
politics, the spectral coming-into-being of which causes official anxiety and the search for
remedies. Talanoa analyzed as an event of social action with its own characteristic poetic
form of participation, gives us the key to how faction comes discursively into being about
particular issues. It may be officially negatively valued and hence denied as part of the
political process – in Western societies, widespread notions that “men don’t gossip” for
example – but it is the very first engine-stroke in the reciprocating system that is the
mechanism in place for the politics of Bhatgaon and other such communities. Talanoa as an
event is a ritual microcosm and metaphor of the macro-social form of political factionalism,
32
which can come into being as men are drawn into co-constructing a far-from-disinterested
account of something with strong community involvement and potentially multiple interests.
Brenneis’s material is fascinating because lurking right beneath the surface of this acephalous
[no head-person in the government apparatus] egalitarian [presumptively non-status-
differentiated] household-based [extended families dwelling in compounds] village
community are processes that both depend on social differentiation and constantly reorder
such social differentitions. Men, and especially heads-of-households are recognized as the
prime political actors, with their very visible and deferred-to statuses always nervously at
stake notwithstanding the ideology of equality. Young men affiliate with the older men as
kinds of political clients, especially via kinship relations (as in supporting one’s nuclear and
extended family). Official political acts, such as pancayat, dispute resolution “council of
five” reveals these status asymmetries, of course, because the whole procedure is an attempt
to soothe ruffled and damaged status claims, not to probe truth and falsity. But as we see,
unofficial but pervasive talanoa always has the potential to be directed to ruffling and
damaging those claims. The talanoa form, in a chain of interlocking such performances, is a
locus of what we might term the cumulation of detail into a factional “charter myth” about
potentially rival or counterposed others, sometimes denoted only by association with a big
man, who may be named, all in the voice of mere ratification of thoughts and views of those
anonymous others whom one alludes to and cites in the course of making (up) the narrative.
As Brenneis (p.c.; quoted in Silverstein 2005, xx, n.xx) noted for me about Bhatgaon,
“egalitarian politics in Bhatgaon at least is shaped in large part by the anticipatory fear of
factional politics (or parti-walla kam, as it is locally known). My consultants saw factions
(partis) as ongoing and problematic in those villages where they had flourished (and at a few
33
times in the Bhatgaon past). It was, I think, one of the reasons that a goal in conflict was not
so much to recruit adherents as to find third-party audiences who could provide the events in
which a conflict would not so much be resolved as the commensurate social worth and
reputation of its parties (in our sense) publicly displayed and vindicated. In any case, in local
commentary, parti-walla kam very much something to be avoided. . . . Factionalism was
always a possibility but, during my own fieldwork at least, not an ongoing feature of local
social organization (it rather, I would say, haunted the social scene through the fact of its
possibility).” I trust we can now see vividly the communicational infrastructure thereof in
one of its circulatory manifestations.
So let me now turn to the question of how “identities” manifest in discursive interaction,
given enregisterment dialectically intersecting indexicality. Are these merely demographic
variables structured into categories of macro-social structure that are directly and transparently
manifest in-and-by the utterance of certain indexicals, even ones that are register shibboleths?
Every time I say such-and-such form, can I therefore be located in social space? This session’s
readings, particularly Hastings & Manning as they invoke Goffman, develop the analytic
machinery with which to see the difference between a naive notion of “indexing identity” and a
much more sophisticated understanding of “‘voicing’ identity” through the workings of the very
dialectic of conventional indexicality and enregisterment we have just established. [Slide 12] As
Hastings & Manning point out, there is a Goffmanian ‘figure’ potentially present – certainly in
so-called “first person” discourse about the “I” interacting with others – that becomes very much
central to how we can ‘voice’ ourselves to interlocutory others (Addressees, Audiences) in
relation to an idea of how a [such-and-such-kind-of-person] would, and in so doing create a
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biographically unique self relationally figurated in respect of these stereotypes. How any one
or more of Goffman’s ‘author’[formulator of the message], ‘animator’ [conveyor of the
message], ‘principal’ [party dependent upon the success/truth/etc. of the message] merge with a
kind of recognizable ‘figure’ is the key here, as they point out.
[Slide 13] It all depends on the interdiscursive transposability by delocutionary
metapragmatics of the “heteroglossia” that emblematically populates the world of normativity
and the worlds of experience and imagination. Hastings and Manning cite Sapir’s pioneering
(1915) “Abnormal types of speech in Nootka,” which was on the reading list of this course when
they respectively took it, in which people with non-normative physical bodies are indexically
mocked by consonant changes or by inserting extra syllables – think “Op language” of children –
into whatever one either puts in their mouths as utterances or, more interestingly [cf. referent
honorification as in Javanese, etc.; here it’s referent degradation], when denoting them and
their doings.
[Slide 13] Voicing one’s own identity-in-play and even understanding and aligning or
disaligning with someone else’s identity-claims or disclaimers depend integrally on
metapragmatic knowledge – even intuition – that connects this current and actualizing
interactional text with some authorizing and genred interactional text located elsewhere in
macro-socio-space-time: as though thinking/saying, “This is how a [social category or group-
member descriptor] communicates.” We can note an apparent “circulation” of identifying
indexical forms in this way, ‘emanating’, as we’ll come to see next time, from certain privileged
sites in social space-time, in effect ritual sites that set indexical value allowing the connection of
sites of interaction in structures of interdiscursivity. Such connections allow us to align with or
disalign from particular sociological (even characterological!) figures as shadowy presences in
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the current interaction whom we can, by degrees, seem to inhabit or keep at distance as we
attempt to perform registers or at least the shibboleths that saliently allude to them (depending on
ability and familiarity). In this process, the alignment of the effectuated, i.e., indexically
entailed, or “performed” ‘me’ and the presentationally communicating ‘I’, i.e., the presupposed
speaker as ‘author’ and/or ‘animator’ – if you will, the particular Bakhtinian voicing of the ‘I’ by
the ‘me’, the ethno-metapragmatic cultural ideal of how a persona of such-and-such identity
communicates (and note the direction of agency and patienthood!) – is communicated to the
extent that the narrator or SENDER [the communicating ‘I’, recall] situates him- or herself with
respect to a normative universe of positionalities (a.k.a. cultural norms) where the ‘me’ lives –
the now only implicitly “narrated” universe – by uttering things recognizable and locatable by
interlocutory parties in a social space of possibilities of identity. Hence the importance of
register shibboleths and enregisterment in general. Identities recognizable and locatable by
whom, one might ask. By any socioculturally competent member of the speech community,
recruitable to the roles of SENDER and/or narrational ADDRESSEE, and who can respond
appropriately to the complex indexicalities involved in what Bakhtin termed ‘heteroglossia’
(raznorechiye) and what we term the enregisterment of indexicality.
So note the spectacular way the relatively disprivileged youngish men of Bhatgaon, a
Hindi-speaking village in Fiji studied by Don Brenneis, do the work of mutual alignment in the
talanoa ‘male gossip session’.