33.2270, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Phonetics; Pragmatics: Planchenault, Poljak (2021)

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Subject: 33.2270, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Phonetics; Pragmatics: Planchenault, Poljak (2021)

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Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2022 16:38:54
From: Juan Bueno Holle [jotajotabueno at gmail.com]
Subject: Pragmatics of Accents

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-3946.html

EDITOR: Gaëlle  Planchenault
EDITOR: Livia  Poljak
TITLE: Pragmatics of Accents
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 327
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Juan José Bueno Holle, Independent Researcher

SUMMARY

The book “Pragmatics of Accents” provides a vibrant collection of studies by
scholars working in several intersecting fields, including linguistics,
education, anthropology, and media studies, and that explore an array of
approaches and analyses of accents that go beyond traditional structural or
variationist descriptions.

Edited by Gaëlle Planchenault and Livia Poljak, this collection of 12 articles
together presents an engaging, informative, and rich resource for scholars in
various disciplines who are interested in exploring pragmatic perspectives
that highlight the contextual, interactional, and ideological realities and
underpinnings in the study of accents. Each contribution to the volume
provides a unique lens through which to study and analyze the production,
perception and interpretation of accents as well as the connections between
these and the sociocultural, political, and historical contexts in which they
are embedded and enacted. One of the main strengths of the book is its
consistent semiotic perspective on the use of accents as symbolic resources.

In the introductory chapter, the editors begin by defining accents as a social
construct. They orient the book’s main purpose as a direct critique of
essentializing views on accents in favor of a perspective on accents as both
grounded in and products of social interactions. Rather than understanding
accents as a constant and as something that people are thought to either
“have” or “not have”, the editors remind us of the inherent instability and
ambiguity of accents as well as of how this understanding is brought to bear
in interaction by interlocutors. 

This perspective draws an explicit relationship between ideologies of accents
and patterns of social discrimination. Two general types of “accented
behaviors” are highlighted:
Taking/faking an accent: this is when accents are judged along the lines of
whether the speaker passes as a competent or natural user of the accent and of
whether they do so legitimately, that is, whether they have a legitimate
allegiance to the community they are imitating. This accented behavior raises
the following question: What stances are taken up by speakers and what frames
of interpretation are used by listeners? This leads directly to an examination
of the dynamics of interaction, including the close attention to context,
showing the validity and power of a pragmatic approach.
Having/losing an accent: this includes considerations about who gets to be
perceived as “having” an accent and who does not, often even against the
speaker’s own expectations. An example is given of an immigrant family whose
members may aim to “hide” their accent as much as possible in order to
assimilate. Tendencies such as these to label and categorize speakers as
“having” an accent perpetuate a system of othering that is based on ideas
about accents as inherently fixed or tied to particular identities.

Before introducing each of the individual chapters that make up the volume,
the editors draw on these two general types to summarize three key dimensions
that are addressed throughout the book: 1) the ideologies and attitudes with
respect to the ways that accents (are used to) index cultural values, 2) the
perception and interpretation of accents as tightly constrained by and
dependent on contexts, and 3) the intentional production and performance of
accents in attempting to accommodate, lose, or hide an accent depending on
specific situations, identities, statuses, and linguistic
hierarchies/hegemonies.

This introductory chapter thus frames a perspective through which accents are
viewed as a semiotic resource employed in production as well as in perception
and interpretation. This perspective allows for each of the authors in the
volume to provide detailed analyses of accents in interaction at the
micro-level as well as of the macro-level structures and hierarchies in which
these are embedded.

The book is then divided into three sections.

The first section is composed of four chapters centered around “Ideologies of
accents in national contexts”. These studies investigate the ways that social,
regional, and migration varieties in four national contexts (Switzerland,
France, Japan, and Germany) are perceived and categorized, especially with
respect to standard language ideologies. 

In the first chapter, titled “Attitudes to accents”, Alexei Prikhodkine
approaches attitudes to accents to highlight the dialectical relation between
agency and social structure. The author reports on a study of changes in the
social meaning in the use of regional French varieties and pronunciations in
Switzerland which are being employed in drawing new ethnonational boundaries
between immigrants and non-immigrants. Specifically, the study shows that the
social meaning of a particular linguistic trait can be interpreted differently
when used by native speakers versus when used by non-native speakers. These
results pose questions for strict social determinist approaches that risk
reifying particular language forms while, at the same time, they challenge
social constructionist approaches that ignore the social constraints on the
ways that speakers can employ language resources. In order to account for
these two dimensions, the agentic and the social, the author argues in favor
of the use of the term “language regard” as a term with adequate explanatory
potential in accounting for the interaction between agency and social
structure, i.e., for the individual dynamics involved in ways of speaking as
well as for their place within a social structure that continues to produce
inequalities.

The second chapter, “Urban youth accents in France” by Cyril Trimaille and
Maria Candea, uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the “accent de
banlieue” in France. The authors review the literature and point out that,
despite widespread media discourse and popular understandings, there is a lack
of an empirical basis for a definition of the precise features of a banlieue
accent, showing that the accent is in fact an unstable linguistic category.
The authors argue, instead, that the accent is better understood from a
critical pragmatic perspective that highlights the indexical relations at play
and that mediate dynamic social and linguistic categories (rather than stable
ones). They then report on two studies, one focused on production and the
other on perception, that demonstrate the wide variability in linguistic
features as well as in their use by a range of speakers. Given these results,
the authors argue that the pronunciation practices understood as making up the
“accent de banlieue” should be considered as contributing to a performance of
“style” rather than an accent. Conceptualizing it in this way allows for a
more accurate and complete picture of the heterogenous and shifting (and more
accurate) social landscapes and linguistic practices.

The third chapter, “Encountering others – and selves– in provincial Japan” by
Edwin K. Everhart, focuses on the use and negotiation of regional accents in
Japan, specifically in the Touhoku (northern Honshu) region. Through
participant observation, the author examines three specific cases that show
how regional accents are subject to interactional work. Through and analysis
of three main elements, namely, features of language that distinguish Touhoku
forms from Standard Japanese, ideologies of social difference that refer to
particular registers or classes of register, and ideologies of language
difference, accent is shown not to be a natural phenomenon but rather a
socially relevant categorization based on a combination of language features,
users, and meanings that are agentively and cooperatively produced in
performance and that, as such, can also be identified, discovered, and even
invented in perception. Moreover, because the labeling of accent can be
valuing or pejorative and can be linked to people in concrete interactions and
pre-existing frameworks of value, it is also possible to thwart identification
of accent through a strategy of non-participation, that is, by withholding
evidence of linguistic difference.

The fourth and final chapter in this section, titled “‘Could I have an
appointment for a viewing?’: Language-based discrimination and apartment
searches with different accents in Germany” by Inke Du Bois, is a study of
discrimination in the housing market in Bremen, Germany. This study analyses
how the use of Standard German, Standard American, and Turkish accented speech
interact in the reproduction of power relations in micro-interactions, with
specific attention to interruptions and repairs. Through an analysis of 300
phone calls, this study finds that landlords and real estate agents treated
callers differently based on the way they spoke: Turkish-accented callers had
a lower chance of receiving a viewing for an apartment in the more prestigious
neighborhood and a greater likelihood of obtaining a viewing in less desirable
neighborhoods. Standard German callers received the most viewing appointments,
and Standard American English accented callers had more chances than Turkish
callers with Turkish names speaking Standard German, showing that Turkish
names apparently weigh more than the use of non-accented German. In addition,
a micro-analysis of interactions shows how Standard German-speaking agents use
interruptions and repair initiations to construct asymmetrical power
relations. Overall, the study shows how discrimination is enforced by house
owners and rental agencies and not by higher city authorities, by effectively
erasing other markers of social class and educational backgrounds and leading
to stratifications into “migrant neighborhoods” and “native neighborhoods”.

The second section of the book is centered around the topic of “Accents in
second language education teaching and learning”. This section collects three
chapters on accents and accent ideologies in teacher training, second language
acquisition, and higher education, focusing especially on identity development
and performance. 

The first of these chapters is titled “The pragmatic force of second language
accent in education”, by John Levis and Shannon McCrocklin. This chapter
begins with the observation that listeners of L2 accents perceive more than
differences in pronunciation, including aspects such as the speaker’s status
in a community and ideas about the speaker’s identity, affiliation, age,
social class, and background. The authors therefore explore the role that L2
accent can play in identity construction and in understanding the variety of
goals that second language learner students, international teaching
assistants, and language teachers can have for their own pronunciation. They
present direct quotes from interviews in which participants talked about their
attitudes and beliefs with respect to how their relationship with L2 accents
affects their identity with a new culture. L2 learners acknowledge the
particular challenges they face in learning pronunciation, including social
judgments about whether they are treated as valid participants, as well as the
often high stakes involved in particular educational contexts. Based on this,
the authors criticize the harmful effects which discriminatory attitudes have
in reducing and neutralizing accents and instead emphasize positive
consequences of diversity and productively institutionalized ways to talk
about accents and speakers.

The second chapter in this section is called “A lack of phonological
inherentness: Perceptions of accents in UK education”, by Alex Baratta. It
discusses accent preferences and cases of accent reduction in UK teaching
contexts. The study highlights two dimensions: 1) the societal evaluations
that accents are characterized by and 2) the types of accents that are
targeted for reduction. The author adopts a distinction between broad,
neutral, and general accents to show that there may be contrasting
perspectives on what a “professional” accent is considered to be.
Specifically, broad realizations of accents, the ones that are most
identifiably connected to particular locations, are the ones to elicit
negative attitudes. The study focuses on the use of the Mancunian accent from
Manchester, England (located in the northern portion of the country) and finds
that local Northern accents are main targets for reduction as compared to
Southern accents. The author then discusses self-evaluation reports by three
teachers who see that accents, while a relevant topic for professional
development, are less about the need to be understood than about conforming to
a general or neutral accent standard. Three main implications are highlighted:
1) teachers may be asked to modify their accents, 2) this modification has a
cost when teachers feel they are being untrue to themselves, and 3) these
conditions can lead to strong power dynamics in mentor-trainee relationships
in professional contexts. 

The final chapter in Section Two is titled “English-language attitudes and
identities in Spain: Accent variation and the negotiation of possible selves”,
by Erin Carrie. Through a series of questionnaires and interviews with
university students learning English in Spain, this study takes into account
learner motivation around identity construction and asks: Are accent
evaluations linked to accent choices for students learning English? The author
reports on the language use of six participants who demonstrate varying levels
of agency in speaking English and who are guided to a greater or lesser extent
by standard language or native speaker ideologies. Some learners may
prioritize sounding like their teacher or like L1 users or as using a high
status variety, while others may prioritize not committing to any particular
variety. In this, the author identifies two key issues: 1) we cannot assume L2
learners want to pass for L1 users, and 2) we need to pay attention to the
role that identity work plays, in addition to more researched variables such
as levels of competence, attitudes, and pressures, so that we can situate
identity construction at the core of our understanding of L2 accents.

The third section of the book gathers together three studies around the topic
of “Accents in the media and the workplace” that investigate the relationship
between accent-related ideologies and the accents that are produced in, for
example, the media (films and videogames) and professional contexts (the
doctor’s office). 

The first of these chapters is titled “From I’m the One That I Want to Kim’s
Convenience: The paradoxes and perils of implicit in-group ‘yellowvoicing’”,
by Hye Seung Chung. This chapter examines the excessive use of exaggerated
accents by an Asian-American stand-up comic, Margaret Cho, and an
Asian-Canadian performer in the sitcom “Kim’s Convenience”. The author
observes the racial implications of these “in-group yellowvoice performances”
and argues that they perpetuate discrimination through the construction of
otherness in the sense that the performances use accented speech to distance
themselves from first generation parents and any regressive ideologies
(homophobia, racism, and patriarchy) associated with them and to solidify
connections to English-speaking accents. The author concludes by asking
readers always to be mindful of understanding who accents are being performed
for and the ways that dominant language ideologies are inscribed in media
production, especially media that caters to mass audiences.

The second chapter in this section is titled “Divine intervention: Multimodal
pragmatics and unconventional opposition in performed character speech in
Dragon Age: Inquisition”, by Emily Villanueva and Astrid Ensslin. It is a
study of the language ideologies at play in videogames, specifically the
accented performance of two female characters in the role-playing game “Dragon
Age: Inquisition”. Through discourse analyses of forum posts and phonetic
analyses of audio clips, the author ties perceptions of the two characters to
accented speech and accented performances, as related explicitly and
implicitly to standard language ideologies enacted by other characters. While
the two characters are presented as counter to each other, their accented
English positions both as “other”, especially in combination with the existing
moral binaries relevant to the game, such as trustworthiness and credibility.
In this way, the study demonstrates how videogames mirror social dynamics,
including dominant ideologies and processes of othering through character
design, speech, and narrative roles, i.e., social meanings which are
pragmatically constructed through textual and paratextual information.
Overall, this study aims to grow awareness of the politicizing effects of
human speech in character design which can make videogames a powerful tool in
either reinforcing or deconstructing harmful ideologies, including the
perpetuation of social binaries.

The last chapter in this section, titled “In the ear of the beholder: How
ethnicity of raters affects the perception of a foreign accent”, by Alexandra
Besoi Setzer, Elena Nicoladis, and C. Lorelei Baquiran, explores the effect
that the ethnicity of the listener may have on the perception of foreign
accents. Because it is known that foreign accents elicit stereotypes and are
used as a cue to placing people on a hierarchy of privilege with real and
important consequences, the study had two main aims: 1) to examine the
cognitive and affective experiences of native and non-native speakers and 2)
to provide recommendations on how to create productive and inclusive
environments for native and non-native employees. In the study, Chinese
Canadians and English Canadians were asked to rate the intelligence of an East
Asian doctor giving a diagnosis in English with a Chinese accent versus the
same doctor speaking English with a Standard Canadian accent. The authors
found that Chinese Canadians attributed lower intelligence to the doctor with
a Chinese accent while English Canadians perceived both doctors as highly
intelligent. As a potential explanation for these results, the authors
consider whether raters’ responses were related to the extent to which they
“buy in” to Canadian identity and how much they aim to distance themselves
from Chinese-accented individuals and the negative stereotypes associated with
them.

The volume ends with concluding remarks entitled “From sound to social
meaning: Investigating the pragmatic dimensions of accents”, by Annette
Boudreau and Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus. This chapter brings together many of the
collection’s themes through an exploration of the authors’ personal
experiences as speakers of minority languages and dialects. This exploration
asks readers to reflect critically on how personal experiences can impact the
work of researchers, especially given that they may live in what can be
described as a constant state of “participant observation”. Using this
situated point of view as a starting point, the authors address what this
means for a pragmatic analysis of accents in two dimensions: 1) the
theorization of the notion of accent and 2) the relationship between accent,
identity, norms, and power. Their observations show linguistic heterogeneity
to be the rule in the sense that accents vary according to context and social
interaction, and have shifting identities, rather than represent stable
underlying categories. The authors stress the impact of social disparities on
the abilities of speakers to draw on their full linguistic repertoires,
whether due to a lack of opportunity to develop or display skills or to a lack
of options to navigate between due to rigid social norms. Finally, they
emphasize that the complex variable of context shows that accent must be
viewed as a symbolic resource that is co-constructed by individuals in
interaction with multiple social meanings and, for this reason, scholars
should favor interactional and pragmatic approaches to the study of accents.  

EVALUATION

This volume presents a strong collection of studies in pragmatics that should
be of interest to scholars not just in linguistics but also across other
disciplines, particularly language education, second language acquisition, and
anthropology. At its core and through this interdisciplinary lens, this
collection successfully interrogates the theoretical status of the notion of
accent.

The focused studies draw on a wealth of methodological approaches, including
experimental methods, mixed-methods approaches, participant observation,
interviews, and conversational data. Due to this range of data sources, the
range of data collected and analyzed is equally broad. Among the types of data
analyzed are concrete examples from perception and production tasks, detailed
phonetic descriptions of accent features, and micro-analyses of interactions,
as well as personal reflections of experiences drawn from the researchers’
lives.

In this way, the collection of 12 articles offer an extremely valuable
perspective on the breadth and depth that is possible in the study of accents.
This is due in large part to the fact that each author in the volume explores
the definition of accent in different ways and from the perspective not just
of production but of perception as well, responding to varying theoretical
concerns and also to differences in the particular speakers and communities
that are being investigated. Ample space is given to understanding and
learning about the use of accents in a range of communities and by a range of
speakers, including immigrant and migrant communities, L2 university students,
and heritage language speakers, as well as videogame characters, players, and
designers. Furthermore, several articles in the volume incorporate insights
gained through centering the close connections between language, culture, and
race, including raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa, 2017). At the
same time, the volume maintains a strong and consistent pragmatic lens in
which accents are analyzed not as stable categories but as the result of the
negotiation of meaning through dynamic interaction, where meaning emerges from
the interpretation not just of linguistic content but of paralinguistic
features as well. The emphasis throughout is on the heterogeneity and
instability of linguistic forms that is inherent in speech and language.

Despite the evident breadth of material that the collection encompasses, a few
related areas are not represented or are left unaddressed. From a
sociocultural perspective, the volume is limited in terms of the geographical
and typological diversity represented, with the majority of studies devoted to
exploring the pragmatics of accents in English or English-adjacent contexts
and only one study focusing on language dynamics outside of the European or
North American context (Everhart). Incorporating studies on the pragmatics of
accents in Deaf communities and in sign languages or in understudied languages
and in language revitalization contexts outside of Europe and North America
could be particularly enriching and valuable areas to begin to build a more
comprehensive pragmatic perspective on accents. 

In addition, several studies in the volume rely on a distinction between
“native” and “non-native” speakers, a distinction which is left unquestioned
despite a clear focus on the negotiated and dynamic reality of linguistic
forms, as mentioned above. Incorporating a critical perspective that
interrogates the concept of “native speaker” (cf. Cheng, et al 2021) could be
a valuable direction for future work, specifically in using a pragmatic
analysis of accents as a view from which to question which kinds of speakers
are perceived as “native” and which are not.

That said, “Pragmatics of Accents” effectively pushes us to consider the study
of accents in deeper and more complex ways, illustrating how the linguistic
and interactional dynamics in the production, perception, and interpretation
of accents must be approached through a pragmatic lens, as well as how this
approach serves as a link to an array of interrelated fields. Because of the
wealth and range of data and perspectives that it draws upon to conceptualize
the theoretical notion of accent, articles from the book would serve well as
core readings in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course concerned with
the close connections between language variation, context, and the nature and
impact of language ideologies. 

References

Rosa, J., and Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a
raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562

Cheng, L., Burgess, D., Vernooij, N., Solís-Barroso, C., McDermott, A., and
Namboodiripad, S. (2021). The problematic concept of “native speaker” in
Psycholinguistics: Replacing vague and harmful terminology with inclusive and
accurate measures. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/23rmx


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Juan José Bueno Holle is a Lecturer in the College of Education at Sacramento
State, where he works mostly with pre-service teachers and bilingual
(Spanish-English) teacher candidates. He holds an M.A. in Applied Linguistics
from the UNAM in Mexico City and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of
Chicago. He is especially interested in multilingualism, endangered languages
and language justice, and has teaching experience at elementary, middle
school, high school, and university levels. His book ''Information structure
in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation'' was published by Language
Science Press in 2019.





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