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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-

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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;

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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,

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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-

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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

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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

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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’.