Barbara Johnstone

Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese.”

This article explores the sociolinguistic history of a U.S. city. On the basis of historical research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews, the authors describe how a set of linguistic features that were once not noticed at all, then used and heard primarily as markers of socioeconomic class, have come to be linked increasingly to place and “enregistered” as a dialect called “Pittsburghese.” To explain how this has come about, the authors draw on the semiotic concept of “orders of indexicality.” They suggest that social and geographical mobility during the latter half of the twentieth century has played a crucial role in the process. They model a particularistic approach to linguistic and ideological change that is sensitive not only to ideas about language that circulate in the media but also to the life experiences of particular speakers; and they show how an understanding of linguistic variation, language attitudes, and the stylized performance of dialect is enhanced by exploring the historical and ideological processes that make resources for these practices available.

Uses of Southern-sounding speech by contemporary Texas women

Anglo-Texas women typically do not think of themselves as Southerners, but many can use speech forms that came to Texas from the American South. The relationship of Texas women to Southern speech is complex, and Texas women orient to and use Southern forms in various ways. Several of the possibilities are briefly illustrated. These examples serve to raise questions about language crossing and stylization in contexts in which the variety being adopted does not clearly ‘belong’ to an outgroup, and to suggest some new avenues for thought about what ‘regional varieties’ are and how regionally-marked speech forms can serve as rhetorical resources.

PITTSBURGHESE ONLINE: VERNACULAR NORMING IN CONVERSATION

��� In this paper, we show how a rhetorical and linguistic microanalysis of a conversation about regional dialect helps illuminate part of the relatively unstudied process of vernacular norm-formation (Milroy 1992, 81–122; Wolfram 2003). Our data is an online discussion of the speech of the Pittsburgh area. As the online discussion illustrates, vernacular normformation may involve discursive practices similar to those that result in language standardization. Like standardization (Milroy and Milroy 1985; Cameron 1995; Lippi-Green 1997), vernacular norm-formation of this sort is embedded in particular interactional, ideological, and historical contexts. In other words, (1) interactional: people who engage in talk about dialect have to do what it takes to claim and keep the conversational floor and successfully contribute to the activity at hand; (2) ideological: in doing so, they draw on and reshape local and supralocal ideas about language and dialect and their social meanings; and (3) historical: people are drawn to conversations such as this because of historical and economic developments impacting on their lives in ways that make them aware of and interested in local speech. Each of these sources of constraint on how dialect-normative talk is shaped plays a role in determining what the norms will be. Our specific goal is to illustrate how each of these three types of context helps shape explicit norms for “Pittsburghese” in an online conversation prompted by the question “Is our local dialect charming or embarrassing?” To illustrate the role of interactional processes, we explore several ways in which participants in the discussion claim the authority to speak. We show that the need to show that one is a legitimate contributor to the discussion results in a great deal of “feature-dropping,” as participants show that they have the right to evaluate local speech by displaying their knowledge of it—thus reinforcing popular beliefs about what “Pittsburghese” is and suggesting new norms. Participants also find feature-dropping useful in building rapport with fellow participants and in making evaluative

Dahntahn Pittsburgh: Monophthongal /aw/ and Representations of Localness in Southwestern Pennsylvania

�In this paper we report on an exploratory study of the history of the monophthongization of the diphthong /aw/ in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We suggest that the persistence of this feature may be linked to the dominant role it plays in print representations of local-sounding speech. In sketching the history of the variable (aw) in the speech of working-class male Pittsburghers as far back as 1850 or so, this study contributes to the small body of descriptive and historical research about the North Midland speech of Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania. In addition, the study contributes to the growing sociolinguistic literature exploring the linguistic correlates of the rapid social and economic changes of the last few decades and their effects on people’s senses of self and place (Bailey et al. 1993; Lane 1998; Schilling-Estes 1998; Beal 1999; Milroy and Watt 1999; Dyer 2000; Royneland 2000). In what follows, we provide evidence for two claims. First, we describe exploratory work that suggests that the use of the monophthongal variant of the diphthong /aw/ (as in [at] for out or [dantan] for downtown) by white, working-class male Pittsburghers is not disappearing, as might be expected on some grounds. Second, we show that of all the features of local speech that are the object of local stereotyping (Labov 1972, 180; Labov 2001, 196–97), the monophthongal pronunciation of /aw/ is by far the most salient, as measured by the frequency with which it is represented in the popular print media via nonstandard spelling. Pittsburghers tell each other over and over, in newspaper cartoons, editorials, and articles, on t-shirts and refrigerator magnets, and in occasional explicit public debate about the role local speech should play in local life, that “real Pittsburghers” say “dahntahn” for downtown, “aht” for out, and so on. At this point we can only suggest that the trajectory of monophthongal /aw/ in Pittsburgh may have

Arguments with Khomeini: Rhetorical situation and persuasive style in cross-cultural perspective

In 1979, the Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci was granted an interview with Iran s Ayatollah Khomeini. The interview turned into an abusive argument. Examination of the text of the interview suggests what went wrong. Explanations focus on two levels: the level of strategies of logical argumentation, and the level of choices of overall persuasive style, logical versus analogical. There are cultural reasons for Khomeinis and Fallacis predisposition to use different rhetorical strategies on both levels; howevery rhetorical strategies emerge in particular situations, and interlocutors communicating in good faith can adapt to one anothers styles.

Gender, politeness, and discourse management in same-sex and cross-sex opinion-poll interviews

Abstract This paper looks at 48 telephone public-opinion survey interviews conducted by female interviewers. In 23 interviews respondents are women, while in 25 interviews respondents are men. We ask whether the interviewers, who work from a script and deviate from it only for pressing reasons, use language differently with women than with men. Specifically, we look at politeness strategies, by which the interviewer keeps the respondent involved and willing to continue, and discourse management techniques, by which the interviewer handles the flow of topics and turns and ensures that she gets the sorts of answers she needs. We find small but interesting differences in politeness: female respondents elicit more sympathy and understanding, while male respondents elicit more attention to their wants and needs and more joking. For discourse management we find more substantial differences: male respondents are managed more in almost every way. This may be because men are less comfortable with this discourse type, in which interviewers control topic and turn-allocation, than are women, and hence less complaint and more eager to subvert the interview by turning it into teasing or banter. Our findings suggest that even anonymous, information-oriented discourse is crucially interactional and point to the importance of discourse management in non-conversational genres.

Variation in discourse: Midwestern narrative style

ENORMOUS PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE in the description of the sounds, words, and grammar of varieties of American English during the past seventyfive years, and especially during the last quarter century. Both in the older tradition of dialect geography and in the newer paradigm of variation studies pioneered by Labov, research on variation in phonology, morphology, and syntax has been relatively unified in focus and in methodology, and its results-though much work still remains to be done-have been relatively clear and cumulative. The same cannot be said, however, of research on variation in American speech at the level of discourse. While there has been some interest in discourse-level variation, different researchers have pursued this interest by examining different sorts of variables, with a variety of differing research methodologies based on differing views about what constitutes the relevant level of analysis. It is not my purpose in this paper to propose a unified paradigm for the study of discourse variation. I will simply point out that there is one sort of discourse variation-regional variation-which has not so far been systematically studied, and sketch a description of some of the characteristics of one discourse genre in one region of the United States. I will show how one feature of Midwestern storytelling style, namely the use of highly specific detail, is tied in several ways to local norms for interaction and for the interpretation of talk. The paper is organized as follows. First, I provide a brief overview of previous research on discourse-level variation in American speech. I then discuss my general research question: Is there regional variation in discourse, and, if so, what might be the parameters of such variation? I next turn to an analysis of spontaneous personal-experience narratives told by one group of Midwesterners, focusing on their use of details. After summarizing relevant research on personal-experience narrative, I will show how the characteristically highly detailed, realistic style of these Midwestern narratives is tied to regional folk perceptions about language and language use.

Reflexivity in sociolinguistics

Reflexivity refers to how language is created by and modeled in language. Variationists’ own discourse is reflexive, as is that of the people variationists study. This has important implications for how variationists talk to their peers and to the people they study and decide what to study and how.

Reasons for Reason-giving in a Public-Opinion Survey*

This paper explores why respondents to a telephone public-opinion survey often give reasons for answering as they do, even though reason-giving is neither required nor encouraged and it is difficult to see the reasons as attempts to deal with disagreement. We find that respondents give reasons for the policy claims they make in their answers three times as frequently as they give reasons for value or factual claims, that their reasons tend to involve appeals to personal experience, and that they often talk about their thought processes, especially when the evidentiary stakes are high. We then explore several ways of explaining these findings. We suggest that one useful approach is to see the reason-giving in the survey interviews as deliberative, reflexive argumentation of the sort described as `critical thinking. We further suggest that the reason such argumentation is often conducted out loud in the interviews, rather than internally, is that it functions in the service of rhetorical ethos, in particular the need to display the fact that one is human, with human autonomy and agency. Doing this may be particularly important in contexts such as anonymous survey interviews in which people are at risk of being treated like machines.

Proximity and journalistic practice in environmental discourse: Experiencing ‘job blackmail’ in the news

The shift from coal to natural gas to fuel electricity generation has positive (environmental) and negative (economic) consequences for people in the affected areas of the US. Representations of the situation in the media shape how citizens understand and respond to it. We explore the role of proximity in media discourse about the closing of a coal-fired power plant near Waynesburg, a small city in a Pennsylvania coal-mining region. Comparing reporting in smaller-circulation newspapers closer to the site with reporting in larger-circulation regional newspapers, we find that Waynesburg-area papers simply describe the events leading to the closure while regional papers analyze the events in larger contexts, and that politicians, not the plant owners, are represented as blaming environmentalists for job loss. Our findings point to the importance of proximity in environmental discourse and to the need to examine not only what kinds of discourse circulate, but also how and to whom.