Discourse and Social Class

[Bruce McComiskey]

Hi all,
	I teach Rhetoric and Composition (Writing) in the English department at
the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  This summer, a linguist friend of
mine (David Umbach) and I plan to work on an essay having to do with the
discourse of social class in student writing.
	We are particularly interested in articles/books that examine social class
through linguistic, discourse analysis, and, especially, critical discourse
analysis perspectives.
	We are not, however, interested in ESL or sociolinguistic approaches that
look at dialect as a marker of the producer's social class.  What we want
are sources that look at how we use language to "class-ify" other people,
to place others in social classes relative to our perceptions of our own
class.
	The East Anglian critical linguists (Hodge, Kress, Trew, etc.) did some of
this sort of work, and I know that van Leeuwen has also done some work
along these lines (e.g., in _Texts and Practices_, though not specifically
in relation to social class).  Also, I've been looking at Basil Bernstein's
_Class, Codes, and Control_, but his work is outdated and comes with its
own set of problems.
	A specific example of the sort of thing we want is this:  passivation
effaces "others" who have acted well and obscures our own faults; and
nominalization obscures unseemly actions.  These linguistic/discursive
strategies can be used to represent "others" of different classes, as well
as ourselves, in positive or negative ways, thus making them highly
political choices.
	Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Bruce McComiskey
Department of English
University of Alabama at Birmingham
mccomisk at uab.edu