Resource For Speakers Research Articles

Intersections of class, race and place

This essay presents an analysis of place references in the spontaneous talk of young Londoners from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. These place references function as ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004) which index multilayered meanings well beyond their denotations, constituting important resources for speakers’ local and supralocal positionings. The essay argues that ‘place’ is an important filter for our experience of language, gender and sexuality and provides scholars with a valuable point of departure for explorations of intersectional identities.

Wicked Which: The Linking Relative in Australian English

This paper examines the linking relative (or connective which) in the spontaneous conversation of Australian English. Using a combination of survey and corpus data, two distinct discourse functions are identified: resumptive topic marker and focus. Survey data from 170 linguistics students at an Australian university indicate a strong preference for the resumptive topic marker function: I argue that this is due to the parallel between discourse function and the structure of the standard relative clause. UWA corpus data suggest that the connective which is used solely to create textual cohesion in Australian English, while anecdotal examples from American English podcasts, blogs and the animated TV show Archer hint at the possibility of this becoming an expressive resource for speakers in the future. Thus it appears the Australian English use of the connective which is situated on the textual level of Traugott’s cline: propositional > textual > expressive.

Accomplishing multiethnic identity in mundane talk

This paper examines identity-related interaction in a group of teenagers at an international school in Japan, focusing particularly on the discursive accomplishment of multiethnic identity among so-called half-Japanese (or “haafu”) people. The study employs Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) to document three instances of mundane talk in which such multiethnic Japanese teenagers are ethnified through the use of various identity categories and their associated activities and attributes. The analysis demonstrates that multiethnic people use a variety of discursive practices to refute unwanted ethnification, including reworking the category, casting themselves in a different category and refusing to react to category-based provocations. Common to all three cases is the fundamental issue of how ethnicity becomes a resource for speakers in everyday conversation.

Indeterminacy and Regularization: a process-based approach to the study of sociolinguistic variation and language ideologies

This article explores the concept of indeterminacy as a fundamental property of social life (Falk-Moore 1978) as it relates to key issues in sociolinguistic theory: the relationship between structure and agency and the way that linguistic signs are invested with social meanings. Indeterminacy emerges as a fundamental principle of sociolinguistic variables, context, speaker identity and participation structures, as a resource for speakers and as a possible objective of communicative practice. It stands in constant tension with processes of sociolinguistic regularization, as it is instantiated across texts, time and discourses and as it is embedded in particular social and political fields. The article argues that studying this tension is how a contemporary sociolinguistics can approach a coherent account of agency and constraint, change and continuity, reproduction and contestation of normative practices and dominant language ideologies.