30.1679, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Beeching, Ghezzi, Molinelli (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1679. Wed Apr 17 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1679, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Beeching, Ghezzi, Molinelli (2018)

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Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 21:26:53
From: Barbara Soukup [barbara.soukup at oeaw.ac.at]
Subject: Positioning the Self and Others

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36470858


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3568.html

EDITOR: Kate  Beeching
EDITOR: Chiara  Ghezzi
EDITOR: Piera  Molinelli
TITLE: Positioning the Self and Others
SUBTITLE: Linguistic perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 292
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Barbara Soukup, Austrian Academy of Sciences

SUMMARY

The book ''Positioning the Self and Others: Linguistic Perspectives'' is an
edited volume published in John Benjamin's 'Pragmatics and Beyond New Series'
(installment #292; series editor: Anita Fetzer, University of Augsburg).
Consisting of thirteen chapters, the volume covers a wide range of theoretical
and methodological approaches to the concept and phenomenon of 'positioning'
(defined programmatically in Chapter 1), whose manifestations are analyzed in
the general linguistic contexts of (varieties of) English, French, Greek,
Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. As the editors indicate, the
contributions to the volume developed out of a thematic panel at the 14th
International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA) in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2015.

In Chapter 1 (''Introduction''), the volume editors Kate Beeching, Chiara
Ghezzi, and Piera Molinelli provide an overview of the book, which they begin
by positing as the book's central unifying theme and scholarly contribution a
focus on the concrete linguistic devices that participants use in
interactional activities of positioning themselves and others (hence also the
book's subtitle). The editors identify four types of such linguistic devices
as centrally featured in the volume: terms of address, pragmatic/discourse
markers, code choice, and orthography. For the purposes of the book's joint
venture, which the editors place in the nexus of pragmatics and
sociolinguistics, they furthermore explicate the concepts of 'positioning',
'identity', 'indexicality', '(inter)subjectivity/ '(inter)subjectification',
and 'ideology'. The foundation of these explications is the social
constructionist view that selves are produced in and through situated
discourse in interaction. 'Positioning' refers to this activity, in which
selves and others (and their relationships) are equally implicated.
'Identity', as a closely related concept, is said to refer to 'work' on the
broader contextual level of 'social positioning' (with reference to Bucholtz &
Hall 2005), with an eye on categorizations and (group) memberships.
'Indexicality' is primarily used to capture how certain linguistic forms
'point to' certain social identities. 'Subjectivity' refers to speakers'
expression of their personal perspective, and 'intersubjectivity' to
relationality between participants. 'Ideologies' are systems of beliefs that
constitute interactional context on the societal level. Following this set-up,
the chapter closes with summaries and syntheses of the ensuing contributions.

In Chapter 2 (''Positioning through address practice in Finland-Swedish and
Sweden-Swedish service encounters''), Catrin Norrby, Camilla Wide, Jenny
Nilsson, and Jan Lindström analyze variation in the use of pronouns of address
(T/V, plural, or no address) by Swedish-speaking staff and customers in a set
of audio- and video-recorded interactions at event ticket outlets in Sweden
and Finland, under a 'variational pragmatics' approach, combining quantitative
and qualitative analyses. They find differences in address usage relating to
participant role, cultural setting, participant age, and situational setting.
Thus, staff exhibit greater variety than customers, and Finland-Swedes more
than Sweden-Swedes. Younger customers eschew address pronouns more often than
older ones. More direct address is used in situations involving some
transactional complexity or problems, than in ones that follow an expected
script. These patterns are said to reflect different priorities and foci in
the positioning activities interactants engage in, such as a focus on the
business at hand vs. on rapport. 

In Chapter 3 (''Sociocultural and linguistic constraints in address choice
from Latin to Italian''), volume co-editor Piera Molinelli traces the
historical development of the present-day Italian address system for social
positioning, in written texts held to be close to spoken language, such as
letters, public presentations, and stage pieces. She shows how the expression
of deference mostly relied on titles/nouns in Latin. Latin pluralization
strategies to project inclusiveness and message attenuation later came to
encode deference in plural pronouns (leading to the use of 'Voi'). In
addition, anaphoric reference to title nouns gave rise to third-person
deferring forms ('Ella' and 'Lei'), a phenomenon the author also links to
Spanish cultural contact. Today, 'Lei' is the unmarked pronoun of deference in
mainstream Italian, after 'Voi' gradually lost the ability to express social
distance (except in certain regional varieties).

Chapter 4 (''Closeness at a distance: Positioning in Brazilian workplace
emails'') by Carolin Debray and Sophie Reissner-Roubicek similarly analyses
written language close to orality, in the form of emails exchanged in
professional contexts in Brazil, a country where, as the authors posit,
personal rapport is extra-highly valued in all settings. Their dataset
consists of 77 emails in Brazilian Portuguese provided voluntarily by
informants from various workplaces and regions. The focus of analysis are
greetings and closings, under the assumption that these constitute central
sites for positioning and relational work. Findings confirm this assumption in
the dataset; furthermore, an influence of type of communication (internal or
external to the organization) on level of formality was evident, with internal
communication being less formal. Absence of greetings and/or closings was
often attributable to urgency or to occurrence within a string of messages
(with less need for address bracketing), but at times also served as a
strategy to index discord.

Chapter 5 (''Beyond the notion of periphery: An account of polyfunctional
discourse markers within the Val.Es.Co. model of discourse segmentation'') by
Shima Salameh Jiménez, Maria Estellés Arguedas, and Salvador Pons Bordería
takes up the notion of positioning in two notably different ways, relating an
investigation of the functions of the Spanish discourse markers '¿no?'
('huh?'), 'mira' ('look'), 'oye' ('hey'), and '¡vaya!' ('wow!'), as expressing
speakers' interactional positioning regarding inter/subjectivity, to a
description of the markers' segmental positioning and scope. Their
contribution proposes to amend a respective analysis under the 'Subjectivity,
Intersubjectivity and Peripheries Hypothesis' (SIPH – e.g. Beeching, Degand,
Detges, Traugott & Waltereit 2009) by application of the 'VAM' discourse
segmentation model developed by the Val.Es.Co. (Valencia, Español Coloquial)
research group (e.g. Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2003), which they describe in
pertinent detail. Illustrating their proposal with examples mainly from the
relevant literature (and also including English data), they conclude that the
VAM, with its hierarchy of discourse units and incorporation of scope, is
particularly apt to account for the functioning of discourse markers to
project inter/subjectivity.

In Chapter 6 (''Metacommenting in English and French: A variational pragmatics
approach''), volume co-editor Kate Beeching develops a quantitative and
qualitative, cross-linguistic analysis of 'metacommenting' as a pragmatic
function mainly expressing speakers' positions regarding utterances, here in
the use of the English markers 'if you like', 'if you will', 'sort of', 'kind
of', and 'like', and in the French markers 'si tu veux'/'si vous voulez',
'quoi', 'genre', and 'comme'. Data are drawn from the spoken language parts of
three large corpora for (British, American, and Canadian) English, and five
smaller corpora for (European and Canadian) French. Findings show different
usage rates of the various forms across the different linguistic varieties,
such that, for example, 'sort of' is more frequent in British than in American
and Canadian English, where 'kind of' is attested more often. 'Quoi' has
become more frequent in European French than in Canadian French, where 'genre'
and 'comme' have higher rates. The author concludes that, while, on the whole,
similar types of forms have been enlisted to express metacommenting
cross-linguistically, regional and national usage stratification has also
turned them into identificational indexes.

Chapter 7 (''Direct speech, subjectivity and speaker positioning in London
English and Paris French'') by Maria Secova stays in the context of English
and French, investigating the current usage of quotatives (such as 'be + like'
or 'go' and 'être là' or 'faire genre') and extenders (such as 'and
everything' or 'whatever' and 'et tout' or 'nanana') that are found to
variably bracket direct speech performance in the linguistic varieties spoken
in London and Paris. Her data consist of a contemporary corpus of informal
adolescent peer-group recordings from the two capitals. Regarding form and
function of the markers, a number of parallels are found cross-linguistically.
For example, hedging and mitigation constitute a frequent realm of usage in
both languages, recruiting similar forms (e.g. 'like' and 'genre'). The author
amply illustrates these and additional forms and functions, with a particular
focus on the development of innovations; ultimately, her report provides a
round-up of the ways in which (bracketing of) direct speech plays a central
role in speakers' interactional positioning activities.

In Chapter 8 (''Positioning of self in interaction: Adolescents' use of
attention-getters''), Karin Aijmer reports on the use of the English
imperatives 'look', 'listen', 'come on', and 'excuse me' as discourse markers
for attention-getting in interaction. Her data come from a socially stratified
corpus of recordings of London teenagers' informal interactions that was
compiled in 1993. The author identifies different interactional functions of
'look', of which she highlights, for teenage speech in particular, the
functions of managing topic shifting, playful arguing, quotation, and
turn-taking (in descending order of frequency). She describes uses of 'listen'
and 'come on' as particularly hearer-oriented and potentially confrontational,
and 'excuse me' as typically used ironically. She concludes that
attention-getters play an important role in adolescents' interactions to
indexically serve purposes of bonding (e.g. via playful antagonism) and
entertaining (e.g. via performances of direct reported speech).

In Chapter 9 (''Constellations of indexicalities and social meaning: The
evolution of 'cioè' in Contemporary Italian''), volume co-editor Chiara Ghezzi
provides a corpus-based analysis of the development over time of the Italian
discourse marker 'cioè' ('that is (to say)'). Drawing on radio phone-in data
from the late 1970s and 2010 that capture different age cohorts, the author
shows that the use of 'cioè', a discourse marker with a range of functions
(signaling e.g. non/paraphrastic reformulation, hedging, or claiming the
floor), stratifies according to age: younger speakers use it more, though its
use has declined over time and become functionally limited (to the
reformulation function). Thus, heightened use of 'cioè' stylistically indexes,
and projects social reference to, both a particular cohort (adolescents and
young adults, who use 'cioè' more than older cohorts) as well as a generation
(those who were young in the 1970s and 80s, who used 'cioè' in a greater
variety of functions than contemporary youths, and who still use it now,
though at lower frequency).

Chapter 10 ('''Proper is whatever people make it': Stance, positionality, and
ideological packaging in a dinnertime conversation'') by Mary-Caitlyn
Valentinsson analyzes a dinner conversation recorded in the western U.S.,
featuring a family with parents of Spanish-speaking origin. The author focuses
on the interactional function of stance-taking, which she conceptualizes in
terms of speakers' momentary expression of their standing towards their
utterance. Stances and their implications, as the author argues, may accrue
over the course of a conversation to form ideologically inflected
'positionalities'. She shows how this plays out in the conversation under
study, where the main interactants (the parents) engage in activities of
stance-taking that project, for example, disbelief, dis-alignment,
combativeness, or scientific authority, and include strategies of code choice.
Ultimately, their accrued stances amount to a contest of language ideologies
negotiating the value of English vs. Spanish and, in particular, Ecuadorian
vs. Dominican Spanish, which reflects and reproduces broader societal
discourses.

In Chapter 11 (''Representations of self and other in narratives of return
migration''), Alexander Nikolaou and Jennifer Sclafani discuss interactional
constructions of non/Greek ethnic identities by Greek return migrants, who,
having grown up elsewhere, returned to live in their Greek parents' country of
origin as adults. The data the authors draw on are extracts from
semi-structured topical interviews with three Greek Americans, an Australian
Greek, and a British Greek (out of a larger dataset). In these data, the
authors illustrate how indexicals such as discourse markers ('you know'),
pronouns ('us'/'them'), imperatives, code choice (Greek vs. English), and
direct reported speech ('constructed dialogue' – Tannen 1986) are used by
narrators for their self- and other-positioning moves regarding issues of
Greek-ness, ethnic hybridity, in- or outsider status, migration, but also to
manage the interview situation itself. Complex constellations of both alliance
and dis-alliance with the target community are the result.

Chapter 12 (''Orthography as an identity marker: The case of bilingual road
signs in the province of Bergamo'') by Federica Guerini returns to an
investigation of written language, in the form of public signage in Bergamo, a
province in northern Italy. On the basis of digital-photography records of the
boundary signage of all 244 provincial municipalities, the author provides a
quantitative and qualitative account of the presence or absence of
bilingualism involving Italian and Bergamasco (the regional Romance variety).
She finds that the bilingual signs encountered, including their featured
orthographic choices, cater to the local audience rather than to outsiders,
and as such have a predominantly symbolic purpose and identity function
(indexing solidarity and ingroup-ness) for the communities. This argument
seems further supported by the fact that bilingual signs appear more in areas
with higher immigrant populations, where the projection and assertion of a
local identity may be of increased importance to community members. 

Finally, in Chapter 13 (''Positioning the self in talk about groups:
Linguistic means emphasizing veracity used by members of the Georgian Greek
community''), Concha Maria Höfler presents an analysis centering on the use of
the discourse marker 'chestno govorya' ('honestly speaking') in interviews
with members of the Greek community in the country of Georgia. Drawing on
extracts from two semi-structured interviews, out of a larger dataset, the
author shows how 'chestno govorya' functions as a set-up for a sequence of
'very frank talk', particularly in the context of circumscribing social group
boundaries (regarding ethnic, national, or religious groups). She argues that
such flagged 'honest speech' about social categorizations is a way for the
interviewees to manage unexpected and even perhaps socially less desirable
comments, and thus to draw in the interviewer and enhance intimacy. By the
same token, the author suggests that looking for the very flagging of such
sequences may lead the analyst to particularly interesting 'hot spots' of
social positioning.

EVALUATION

With its wide scope and range of theoretical and methodological perspectives
on positioning, and its coverage of a great variety of languages as well as
geographical and situational settings and contexts, the book ''Positioning the
Self and Others'' provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the current
state of research on its topic and pivotal concept. The contributions are
accessibly written, even in some more technical parts. Indeed, it may be in
acknowledgment of the book's breadth of theoretical and methodological
coverage that the uses of field-specific concepts and terminology are
explained well throughout, even for non-specialists, making the volume ready
and recommended reading for all scholars and (graduate) students of
linguistics alike who are interested in the phenomenon of positioning. At the
same time, though, due to the advanced nature of the topic itself and of
discourse analysis as a methodological approach, which both arguably
presuppose some background and foundation in pragmatics and sociolinguistics,
the book may not be an obvious choice for undergraduates. 

The breadth of scope and inclusiveness of approaches to positioning in the
present book may actually seem surprising at first, from the perspective of
the concept's foundations in social psychology (see notably the programmatic
van Langenhove & Harré 1999), which operate with a much narrower focus on
''the assignment of fluid 'parts' or 'roles' to speakers in the discursive
construction of personal stories that make a person's actions intelligible and
relatively determinate as social acts'' (van Langenhove & Harré 1999: 17).
Yet, in the introduction, the editors provide a very helpful synopsis and
synthesis of the book and its individual contributions, by which they
convincingly tie the venture together and nicely bring out its common
denominator: a focus on how the discursive construction and presentation of
self and other (and their relations) is enacted via the use of specific
linguistic devices (of some variety). 

As mentioned in the summary above, the introductory chapter also succeeds in
making the book cohere by programmatically advancing definitions of some
central concepts (positioning, identity, indexicality, (inter)subjectivity,
and ideology). This is a very helpful feature and frame of reference for
reader orientation. However, noticeably absent from this list is the concept
of 'stance', which is notoriously difficult to differentiate from
'position(ing)', as evident also in the fact that, throughout the volume, the
two concepts often seem to be applied interchangeably, as taking up a
standpoint regarding oneself, the interlocutor(s), and/or relevant utterances.
Of course, interchangeable use and conceptualization of 'stance' and
'position' is one possible and viable approach to take. At the same time,
differentiations have been proposed in the literature – as evident in Chapter
10, in which Valentinsson (with reference notably to Jaffe 2009) reviews the
two concepts separately, and eventually applies a differentiated and ordered
hierarchy whereby 'stances' accrue into 'positionalities' during continued
interaction. To exemplify another approach, Schiffrin (2006: 208) provides the
contrasting definitions, ''whereas positioning deconstructs speaker's identity
projection in relation to what is said, […] stance addresses the epistemic
basis of the speaker/content relationship.'' Whether or not one finds it
useful to equate the two terms 'stance' and 'position' or to differentiate
them may be a matter of scholarly tradition, research focus, and
terminological preference. The point to make here, though, is that providing
an explicit take on the matter would have been helpful in the context of the
present volume, to further enhance clarity and facilitate adoption in future
research.

This is not to detract from the fact that, throughout, the book deals in
high-quality, technically/linguistically solid discourse analysis, which is
always difficult to pull off (while it is so much easier to veer into mere
dissection of content). Therefore, one of the great achievements of the
present volume is that its contributions, across the board, really tie their
analyses down to particular, concrete linguistic features, devices, and
resources, explicating the very mechanisms underlying interactional and social
positioning. As already mentioned, the editors posited as one of the
publication's goals to illuminate specifically ''the linguistic means used to
index the relationship between self and other(s) in different types of
communicative activity,'' (p.1), and the volume succeeds in this endeavor.

REFERENCES

Beeching, Kate, Liesbeth Degand, Ulrich Detges, Elizabeth Closs Traugott &
Richard Waltereit. 2009. Summary of the workshop on 'Meaning in Diachrony' at
the First International Conference on Meaning in Interaction, University of
the West of England, Bristol, UK, April 23-25, 2009.

Briz, Antonio & Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2003. Un sistema de unidades para el estudio
del lenguaje coloquial. Oralia 6. 7-61.

Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural
linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7 (4-5). 585-614.

Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.). 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Langenhove, Luk van & Rom Harré. 1999. Introducing positioning theory. In Rom
Harré & Luc van Langenhove (eds.), Positioning theory, 14-31. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Schiffrin, Deborah. 2006. In other words: Variation in reference and
narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Tannen, Deborah. 1986. Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American
conversational and literary narrative. In Florian Coulmas (ed.), Direct and
indirect speech, 311-332. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Barbara Soukup is an Elise Richter Research Fellow at the Austrian Centre for
Digital Humanities (ACDH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a
sociolinguist who specializes in integrating a wide range of methodologies,
she currently investigates the processes of meaning-making via the use of
English vs. German in the linguistic landscape of Vienna, Austria ('ELLViA' -
Austrian Science Fund project #V394-G23).





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