P2 THEORIES

HEGEMONY

HEGEMONY

Antonio Gramsci

Dominance of ruling class whose views become the accepted norm

SYMBOLIC CAPITAL

Pierre Bourdieu

Certain communicative behaviour are considered more prestigious and those associated are offered more social advantages. Social power, dominance and subordination are maintained through language construction (gatekeeping).

LEGITIMATION

Van Leeuwen

“Hegemonic processes undertaken to persuade other groups to their view of reality and secure their consent to rule.”

List the 4 legitimation strategies

1. Rationalisation (reasoning, logic)

2. Authorisation (credibility, authority)

3. Moral legitimation (ethics, values which encode ideology)

4. Mythopoesis (stories and narratives, constructing hypotheticals)

DELEGITIMATION

Ross and Rivers

Definition of a nation by Anderson, 1991

an “imagined community” produced by circulated print which bestows on people a shared experience and ideology

spatial identity quote by Barnes, 2000

who we are is inextricably linked to where we are, have been, or are going

spatial identity quote by Benwell and Stokoe, 2006

spaces make people by offering them opportunities to craft their identity

Martha’s Vineyard

Labov, 1963

• island off the coast of Massachusetts

• locals adjusted pronunciation of vowels through high centralisations to distinguish themselves as the native in-group

Australian skateboarder and coach

Arisa Trew’s coach gave her some wise words of advice before her Olympic final: “Skibidi sigma”. The nouns phrase may have seemed like a string of nonse words to you and I, but Trew heard those words and went on to win the Olympic gold. Trew said, “It’s like a joke that I have with all my friends…”

• sense of solidarity that pushed her to win the gold

• sigma: repurposed Greek letter that means a cool person

• skibidi: non-lexical vocable, neh-neh-ni-poo-poo, na-na na-na boo-boo

socialisation quote by Liebkind, 1999

“At this stage of life, young people develop active memberships in peer groups acting no longer as individuals but as carriers of common characteristics of their social groups.”

socialisation quotes by Lemke, 2002

“High school becomes the primary setting for accumulation of identity resources that can instantiate larger-scale stereotypes for gender-, class-, age-, and culture-specific identities.”

department stores

Labov 1964

• went to three department stores that catered to three socioeconomic groups: Saks, Macy’s and S. Klein

• studied how employees pronounced the NP “fourth floor”, in particular the pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/

Spiaking Singlish

Gwee Li Sui

• Singlish as an unmarked vernacular to a stylised register, to demonstrate that one is of higher class

• Singlish being iconised and politicised into a register for resistance and discursive activism after the SGEM

• Singlishisms: “cheemest”, “cheem” (Hokkien loanword ‘deep’) inflected with superlative ‘-est’ suffix

• words of non-English origin meshed into English morphologies

• “macam apples and oranges” idiomatic expression used alongside Malay loanword “macam” (akin to)

• performance of a marked Singlish, boasting already a certain sophistication in phrasing that speaks to ther craft as a professional writer

• commodified for the western gaze, whereas monolectal locals may find it off-putting and unnatural

features of AAVE

• absence of copula verb “be”

• invariant “be” to signal recurring/habitual actions

• multiple negation

• consonant cluster simplification

• slang terms like hella, turnt, aite

Language as Social Facts

Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916

Interpellation

Louis Althusser

mechanism by which the human subject is constructed by pre-existing social norms or state apparatus

Advertising’s 15 Basic Appeals

Jib Fowles, 1998

for sex, for affiliation, to nurture, for guidance, to aggress, to achieve, to dominate, for attention, for prominence, for autonomy, to escape, to feel safe, for aesthetic sensations, to satisfy curiosity, psychological needs

Discursive Production of Subject

Michel Foucault

identities inscribed in discourses operate to reproduce social inequalities, to preserve the status quo

Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu

Labels of Primary Potency

Gordon Allport

reductionist and essentialist, salient and powerful social labels that describe groups seen as different from the mainstream, causing them to lose their individuality

Verbal Hygiene

Deborah Cameron

Euphemism Treadmill

Steven Pinker

Adam and Eve quote

Stanley, 1975

“the documents that we have were written by men for the edification of other men, and, as such, they deal with male concerns from a male point of view”

“the standard-bearer of male linguistic prerogative has been Adam. Adam, the husband of Eve, you’ll remember, has been credited with the naming of the animals”

Deficient Model

Lakoff, 1973

Dominance Model

Zimmerman and West, 1975

the incidence of interruptions are much higher and more uniformly distributed across the male-female segments than proves to be the case for the same-sex transcripts

Difference Model

Tannen, 1990

report talk (men) vs rapport talk (women)

The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation

Eckert, 1997

Boys obtain prestige through achievements, and girls, through constructing and displaying socially acceptable persona, utilising language as one such means

Women, Men and Politeness

Holmes, 1995

extention of Lakoff’s, considering broad contextual factors and functions of politeness with relation to socialisation and habitus

Gender Performativity

Butler, 1990

“Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that conceal over time to produce the appearance of substance, a natural sort of being.”

Examples of semantic change of gendered words

• Master vs Mistress

• Spinster vs Bachelor

Gendered morphology

1. Grammatical gender marking of nouns, with the male being the unmarked, default/normal form

2. He/him/his as the default resumptive pronoun

Honorific-related gender issues

• distinctions in honourifics based on women’s marital status but not men’s

• lack of use of honourifics when referring to women in professional settings

Communicative Competence

Dell Hymes

To be a functional member of the community, knowing the language means more than just knowing how to pronounce grammatical utterances

Social constructionist approach to language

Language is not so much the agent of construction as it is a

• reflection of our membership of social categories

• contribution to the construction of our social identity (i.e. we are the agents)