Final Reminder: LDC Institute Presentation by Stanton Wortham

[James J. Fiumara]

The Linguistic Data Consortium is hosting the next LDC Institute
TODAY from 1:00-3:00pm in the LDC Conference Room,
Suite 810, 3600 Market Street.

Stanton Wortham from the Penn Graduate School of Education will be
presenting "The Contextualization of Linguistic Forms across
Timescales."

Please Note: Directions to the LDC can be found at:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Contact/

A pizza lunch will be provided.

We hope that you can attend. Future presentations include Harold
Schiffman from the Department of South Asia Studies presenting
"Tongue-Tied in Singapore: A Language Policy for Tamil?" Thursday
February 26, 2004 from 12:30-2:30pm.

More information about the LDC Institute series can be found at:
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/LDC_Institute


The Contextualization of Linguistic Forms across Timescales

When people speak, they socially identify themselves and others. The use
of linguistic forms is one important means through which social
identities get established. But the implications of any utterance for
social identity depend on relevant context. Decontextualized
sociolinguistic regularities cannot fully explain how a given utterance
establishes a given social identity, although such regularities
certainly play an important role. The centrality of context seems to
imply, methodologically, that a full linguistic analysis of social
identification must rely on case studies of particular utterances in
context. Social identification, however, is not a phenomenon of isolated
cases. An individual gets socially identified across a series of
interrelated events, not a series of unique, unrelated contexts. This
paper describes an empirical research project which traces the identity
development of a ninth grade student across the academic year in one
classroom. The student’s identity develops in substantial part through
speech events that position her in socially recognizable ways. The paper
presents a methodological strategy for analyzing the interrelated events
across which this individual gets socially identified, focusing on
specific kinds of speech events that play a central role in the
emergence of her social identity across time. This project provides an
opportunity to reflect on the kinds of data necessary for studying
social identification.