Introduction
In this chapter, I show that speakers actively resist using certain styles of language (which they may or may not control) based on a perception that those styles do not match their own positioning as social actors. Through a discussion of the way in which speakers develop and present these values through their explicit speech and actions, I argue that both awareness and control are rooted in large-scale systems of social meaning that can be manifested in multiple ways. In the sense that I examine it in this chapter, “awareness” can be observed as part of a style or stance that interacts with deeper societal structures of power and control, as well as through overt comments about language practice and in the use of particular variables, as it has more often been studied. Arguably, the former, broader sense is the more salient type of awareness for speakers, and the level at which power and positioning are negotiated most explicitly. Because of the complex nature of awareness, this process not only involves linguistic features, but is also bound up with questions of culture and political stances, ways of knowing, and attitudes that are connected to the full complex system of cultural signs in which language participates.
Literature Review
Language interacts with deeper societal structures of practice and power, as has been shown repeatedly in research on sociolinguistics and related disciplines (Foucault Reference Foucault1980; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991; Urban Reference Urban, Silverstein and Urban1996; Eckert and Wegner Reference Eckert and Wegner2005). Research on language ideologies has also amply demonstrated that language is connected to powerful political and cultural forces (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979; Woolard Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998; Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000; Choksi and Meek, this volume). Even in his earliest sociolinguistic studies, Labov showed convincingly that ways of speaking are influenced by attitudes about language that are tied to economic and material circumstances, and that individuals have substantial latitude in the way they position themselves with respect to these systems of power and privilege. To take a pair of classic examples, Labov’s Martha’s Vineyarders were interested in resisting the prestige and economic status of wealthy mainland varieties by presenting themselves as locals (Labov Reference Labov1972). In a case study in New York City, Labov described Nathan B, who does not use or, apparently, perceive the difference between the prestige variant [θ] and the low-status [d] despite his high level of education and upper-middle-class background (Labov Reference Labov2006: 157–60). Labov noted that although Nathan B was asked to take speech classes in order to gain an academic appointment, he declined to do so. While Nathan B is often framed as “deviant” or an “outlier” in the academic literature, we can also see his linguistic behavior as a way of exercising his ability to resist societal norms. As briefly illustrated by this pair of classic examples, both individuals and groups use language to express their resistence to or conformity with particular societal norms (see also Eckert Reference Eckert2000).
Labov’s Vernacular Principle states that the “vernacular,” a style of speech of which we are least aware, is the “truest,” least self-conscious, and most relaxed – the least controlled (Labov Reference Labov1972, Reference Labov2006). (See Carmichael, this volume, for a discussion of the Vernacular Principle.) Thus, awareness, control, and authenticity are linked from the very beginning of the sociolinguistic literature. While by Labov’s definition less “natural” than the vernacular, a speaker’s ability to modify their speech based on context has been taken as evidence of their capacity for style-shifting (Rickford and McNair-Knox Reference Rickford, McNair-Knox, Biber and Finegan1994; Eckert and Rickford Reference Eckert and Rickford2001; Johnstone Reference Johnstone and Jaffe2005). In some contexts, style-shifting can even be considered artificial; Schilling-Estes describes style-shifting as performance or “putting on” a dialect (Reference Schilling-Estes1998). Whether natural or artificial, linguists have considered an active command of particular sociolinguistic features (more often phonetic/ phonological than grammatical) as proof of a speaker’s control of sociolinguistic variation.
Labov attempts to capture the role of awareness – perception – of sociolinguistic variables through his well-known three-way classification of indicator/marker/stereotype (Reference Labov1972: 178–9). Indicators are variables that are socially stratified, but of which people are unaware; markers are socially and stylistically stratified and people show some level of awareness through attempts to control them; and stereotypes are explicitly discussed and associated with particular social groups (but may not be in active use in the community). This schema, however, is notoriously slippery; it is very difficult to find clear-cut examples of features that fit neatly into one of the three categories. This may be due in part to the choice to begin with linguistic variables rather than language attitudes. Particular sociolinguistic variables may or may not be accessible to people for explicit discussion, although they often have strong opinions about styles of speech or social groups that they associate with a set of linguistic features. The shift from the study of variables to the study of attitudes is laid out by Preston (Reference Preston1996, this volume; see also Choksi and Meek, this volume).
In the literature that attempts to capture what makes us aware of particular sociolinguistic variables, the relationship between “linguistic” and “social” factors is highly fraught. A plethora of studies on the theoretical concept of salience ultimately fail to distinguish between purely linguistic and purely social factors in recognizing language (Auer et al. Reference Auer, Barden and Grosskopf1998; Rácz Reference Rácz2013; see also Preston this volume, Choksi and Meek, this volume, for discussion). Silverstein (Reference Silverstein1981) argues that linguistic criteria for recognizing language are linked to sociopragmatics and to other cognitive mechanisms; however, even Silverstein fails to capture the importance of social norms in producing and discussing language. One of his central examples concerns the repetition of an uncomplimentary augmentative form, which the speaker subsequently insists she has not used and does not recognize. What, if not societal norms and interpersonal relationships, would result in this kind of reaction?
No subfield of linguistics has done more to complicate the relationship between social and linguistic factors than sociophonetics. Sociophonetic studies have demonstrated that awareness of sociolinguistic variables is related to the perception of social categories on the part of the listener (Niedzielski Reference 227Niedzielski1999; Hay et al. Reference Hay, Warren and Drager2006). This observation, made through experimental techniques, takes the discussion away from status of a particular linguistic variable, based largely on structural characteristics, and moves it towards beliefs held by listeners. However, there are limitations to sociophonetic research. Because of its focus on perception, this literature addresses awareness in a very precise way, but does not address control (see McGowan, this volume, for an exception to this generalization). Much like early variationist studies, the vast majority of this literature describes college students (largely middle-class, white, and monolingual) in Anglophone North America and New Zealand. Therefore, these scholars can take for granted the readers’ background knowledge of the varieties they describe – a body of cultural knowledge that should not be taken lightly, and which must be made explicit when discussing cultural situations that are not as familiar to academic readers who often share these demographic characteristics.
The picture is further complicated because both “awareness” and “control” have multiple overlapping senses or levels. Scholars in different subdisciplines are not always measuring the same thing when they discuss awareness and control (see Campbell-Kibler, this volume). In part, this is due to the fact that at a cognitive level, it seems that there is more than one type of awareness to consider (Campbell-Kibler Reference Campbell-Kibler2010, this volume; Labov et al. Reference Labov, Ash, Ravindranath, Weldon, Baranowski and Nagy2011; Drager and Kirtley this volume). Awareness of linguistic features can – indeed must – be measured on multiple dimensions and on multiple scales (Preston Reference Preston1996). It has also been shown that perception (awareness) does not equal production (control). Johnstone and Kiesling give evidence that the speakers who are most aware of “Pittsburghese” features are those who do not use them, and vice versa (Reference Johnstone and Kiesling2008). This point is reinforced by Nycz: Even very high awareness may not lead to change, while absence of awareness does not preclude it (this volume, p. 76). Squires (this volume) argues that there is a distinction between perceiving and noticing, distinguisting between implicit and explicit knowledge of variation (p. 83); see also Preston, this volume, on noticing (p. 186).
One of the most difficult challenges faced by scholars is how to understand awareness and control through – or in spite of – this great complexity of factors. The main goal of this chapter is to examine the larger social and cultural environment in which awareness and control are embedded, and through this to gain a better understanding of how speakers use the social and linguistic material available to them in order to position themselves as social actors. In order to do this, I want to take a step back and think about what scholars have considered “proof” of awareness and control in their work. Throughout the literature reviewed above, we can make a generalization that evidence of awareness and control is found in one of three ways: (1) through experimental methods that measure perception, as in sociophonetics; (2) through a speaker’s demonstrated use of a variable over different contexts, as in variationist sociolinguistics; and (3) through the ability to discuss language explicitly, as in the study of language ideologies and “folk” linguistics (Niedzielski and Preston Reference Niedzielski and Preston2003). However, in order to fully understand awareness and control, we must be able to give a detailed account of the integration of social systems with linguistic practice and positioning. In order to address this question, I examine a case that goes in the opposite direction; a case in which speakers refuse or resist the use of a particular style of speech. Rickford (Reference Rickford, Wolfson and Manes1985) demonstrates that in any social situation, there are multiple competing systems of value at work. Given this fact, how might we think of evidence that comes from the absence of speech or from refusal to participate in a particular context?
I frame this question through a discussion of the literature on silence. In scholarly work that uses largely qualitative methods, scholars have conclusively demonstrated that silence is not just an absence of speech, and certainly not an absence of meaning (Maltz Reference Maltz, Tannen and Saville-Troike1985; Tannen and Saville-Troike Reference Tannen and Saville-Troike1985; Jaworski Reference Jaworski1993; Jaworski Reference Jaworski1997; Kurzon Reference Kurzon2007b; Ephratt Reference Ephratt2011; Kurzon Reference Kurzon2011). In order to be socially meaningful, however, silence must be placed in a sociolinguistic context (Basso Reference Basso1970; Kurzon Reference Kurzon2007b). Once placed in a social context, silence can be intersubjective (Pagis Reference Pagis2010) – a form of communication – and intertextual (Kurzon Reference Kurzon2007a). As in the case studies that I present, silence is often gendered and may represent resistance to social structures (Gal Reference Gal1989; Fivush Reference Fivush2010). Kurzon argues that silence can be “metaphorical,” in Lakoff’s sense, when it concerns not an absence of speech, but rather silence on a particular topic, or off-the-record speech (Reference Kurzon2011). Whether silence is literal or metaphorical, however, it participates in a system of cultural norms and expressions.
Importantly, the practice of silence may or may not reveal a lack of control – both in the sense of being able to shift styles or perform different types of speech, and in the sense of using silence to exert or resist power rooted in hegemonic social structures. For this reason, measures of control that consider only linguistic performance and omit resistance and refusal may miss types of awareness that occur at a more complex level of social structure than the individual sociolinguistic variable. In the study of awareness and control to date, speakers’ performance of features or the demonstrated ability to recognize them has been taken as the best way to measure awareness. In the study of silence, on the other hand, awareness of linguistic and social norms leads speakers to use silence – that is, the avoidance of particular topics, variables, linguistic forms, or speech itself – as a meaningful social resource. I argue that this avoidance can constitute evidence of not just awareness, but also of social positioning – a type of control. This broader societal sense of control complements and encompasses the more specific sense, in which speakers control particular features of a style or register of speech.
Data 1: Ethnographic Evidence
General Background
The data for this chapter come from my fieldwork in a contact zone of central Bolivia, located in the triangle between Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz (see Map 9.1). The town where I work, Iscamayo,Footnote 1 is a medium-sized town of several thousand inhabitants, located on a main road between two major cities. It is located in the Santa Cruz valleys, in an area where there is a high degree of Quechua-Spanish contact influence. Quechua contact features are commonly used as socially meaningful linguistic markers, even by Spanish-dominant speakers. I have participated in this community as a researcher, a family member and friend, and a development worker since 2002. I use my long-term relationship with this community to engage in deep ethnographic fieldwork. The present analysis comes from the observations I have made over the twelve years of my participation in the community, and in particular from a series of recordings made in 2008, which were made with the intention of describing the occurrence of contact features across three types of situations: conversations, interviews, and meetings (see Babel Reference Babel2011). In this following section, I discuss the use – and disuse – of the speech genre known as oratoria “oratory” in meetings and other types of events, such as interviews.
Map 9.1 Bolivia
Meetings and Oratory
In the Santa Cruz valleys of Bolivia, community meetings, and thus community representation, are the domain of the wealthy, the educated, the literate, and the oratorically skilled. In this area, as in much of Latin America, speakers are expected to use a named genre of speech, oratoria ‘oratory’ in formal, on-the-record situations such as public meetings. A pamphlet that I bought on this topic emphasized fluency, naturalness, and finding one’s own voice; but in my observations of public meetings, I found that another important aspect of oratory involved the command of a flowery oral genre including learned and technical vocabulary. People were implicitly and explicitly evaluated on their oratorical skill when they engaged in public speech, and oratory was taught in schools. Self-improvement pamphlets teaching people how to improve their oratory were sold by hucksters on public buses, together with tracts on nutrition and religion. Formal oratory was not the only type of language that was used in meetings, nor were good orators the only people to speak in meetings, but they were generally felt to be an important ingredient in establishing a meeting context.
Map 9.2 Central Bolivia
Women from rural areas were often reluctant to enter these settings as speakers because they felt ashamed of their own poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy; or, not exclusively, they expressed scorn for the way in which the meetings were organized and run because they were ineffective and often corrupt. Many of these women identified with a traditional value system, which emphasized personal ties, hard work, and generosity as the primary criteria on which a person was judged. On these measures, they were well-respected members of their community. In contrast, under the “modern” system of values, they were judged as lacking personal wealth, education, and social mobility (cf. Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995).
The division between “speaker(s)” and “audience member(s)” was visible in the physical organization of meetings as well as in the type of speech and speakers that participated in them. In the formal community meeting, the canonical context for the use of oratory, speakers – often wealthy and male – sat or stood facing the audience. Speech was strictly regimented, with the use of la palabra (literally ‘the word’) as a formalized method of taking or ceding the floor.Footnote 2 While the rules of order were not always strictly adhered to, it was generally felt that a “good” meeting involved orderly turn-taking and following the agenda. In one unruly meeting I observed, an audience member accused those present of “buzzing like a swarm of bees” because they would not adhere to the one-speaker-on-the-floor format. Meeting speech was “on-the-record” both figuratively and literally – it was recorded in the minutes, or libro de actas, kept by the meeting secretary, and formed a part of the permanent record of the organization.
However, on-the-record speech was not the only kind of speech that went on at meetings. Women who identified with a traditional value system might sit towards the back of the audience and whisper to each other, or hang over the edges of the room – at windows and doors – and occasionally throw out comments that might generate a laugh or be picked up by other participants in the official, on-record speech. These off-the-record contributions were sometimes in Quechua, which was never used on the floor; when made in Spanish, they were much more likely to contain Quechua contact features (which were especially humorous in this context) than were the on-the-record contributions.
Women’s meetings – organizations that are specifically targeted to women, such as the Mother’s Club or agricultural groups that work with small-scale domestic production – were organized differently from canonical meetings. While presiding officers were seated in an area reserved for the mesa directiva “board of directors” at the head of the room, in the absence of outside observers there was usually general private conversation rather than official, on-the-record speech. People sat near their friends and made their opinions known by facial expressions, gaze, and comments thrown out on the floor, or muttered under their breath without formal turn-taking or use of la palabra. When women did speak to the group, they often covered their mouths or giggled as if embarrassed or shy. Decisions tended to be made among blocs of friends or relatives before they were discussed in the meeting. Rather than focusing on the formal structure of the meeting event, the emphasis of these clubs was on projects and deeds: cooking, knitting, raising livestock, planning trips, and organizing or participating in community events. While some women did speak in the more formal community meetings, they were generally wealthy or well-educated, and they were in a small minority among the speakers. Women’s meetings were less prestigious and considered less important than the formal community meetings.
Ethnographic Evidence of Resistance
In the data that I present here, women demonstrated their awareness of social expectations related to language by controlling their participation in events such as the meetings described above, as well as in formal, structured interviews that I attempted to carry out in the community. These interviews are similar to meetings, in that they were understood by my participants as a situation in which a demonstration of education and erudition was required. As I discuss in more detail below, most of my female friends avoided them at all costs. At a superficial level, it appeared that women were not participants in interviews and meetings, yet they did participate in ways of their own choosing, and they exerted considerable control over the outcome of the projects they were asked to participate in. The following ethnographic vignettes illustrate they ways in which women’s silence could mask their very real participation in these social contexts and the power that they held over the outcomes. This control is – to me – evidence that women are not simply “opting out” of oratorical contexts; rather, they are shaping their roles in development projects through alternative types of positioning and participation. However, these modes of engagement with social categories and expectations largely preclude the use of sociolinguistic features that would qualify as evidence of “control” as it has been traditionally considered in sociolinguistics.
Vignette 1: San Antonio
I’m sitting in a neighborhood meeting in Barrio San Antonio, a poorer neighborhood on the periphery of town, settled mostly by recent migrants. An outsider, an engineer from the city of Cochabamba, is running the meeting. I am seated on a little stage with the community leaders, all older men; the engineer paces back and forth in front of us. Facing us are rows of chairs. On these chairs sit a couple of dozen community members, mostly men. Women, especially women wearing pollera, are squatting around the edges of the room or hanging on the open windows.Footnote 3 Trying to involve them in the conversation, the engineer, who has been speaking in Spanish, turns and addresses them in Quechua. “Haku!” he says. Come here! “Ima sutiyki?” What’s your name? They giggle and hide their faces and blush, refusing to answer.
Vignette 2: Town Hall
I’m in a meeting in the Town Hall, in the center of town, at the center of the local power structure. I’m sitting about halfway back in the inevitable rows of chairs. The room is full, with perhaps sixty people present, some standing at the back. My sister-in-law is seated next to me, my mother-in-law on the other side. It’s a meeting about the construction of state-financed housing with disaster funding from the national government. All those present have signed loans for property in the construction zone. As the treasurer goes over rendición de cuentas, giving a budgetary report, my sister-in-law keeps up a steady commentary on the proceedings in my ear, behind her hand. I can barely hear her and can’t understand her at all, although she giggles raucously at intervals. Even though I have my recorder on my lap, it picks up virtually nothing of her speech. Back at home, she and my mother-in-law discuss the proceedings with interest, indicating their agreement or (more often) scornful disregard of the concrete steps that they are being asked to take, and worrying over the time and money that they are asked to contribute to the project.
Vignette 3: Barrio Nuevo
I’m in a meeting in Barrio Nuevo, an established neighborhood outside the center of town. Another engineer is present, explaining about a program run by the electrical company to plant trees in the area (Iscamayo is very arid and trees do not grow naturally). The company offers to provide the trees for free; the community members are responsible for planting, watering, and tending them. The men at the front of the room make elegant speeches about the importance of the project and the beauty of the trees that will grow. A bold, cheerful woman, sitting to one side, is giggling noisily with the women to either side, her eyes shining. Finally, she interjects, speaking to the room. ¿Y si se k’ajlla? ‘And if it splits?’ she asks, using a Quechua word, wondering if she will be held responsible if the trees fail to thrive. The room breaks up in laughter. The engineer ignores her and continues with his presentation.
Vignette 4: Mother’s Club
I’m in a Mother’s Club meeting in a small town just outside of the urban area, where the women’s group is discussing an upcoming trip to a neighboring town. After we discuss the difficulties of finding appropriate transportation, the president calls for a vote on whether to go through with the trip, but the women just sit there and whisper with each other. Finally, the president stands up and walks around the room, looking at each woman in turn and asking whether she can come. Answers range from a shy yet daringly direct Ya ‘Okay’ to No sé todavía ‘I’m not sure yet’ (this is a polite indirection, implying “no”). A few women make sour faces and state directly No se va a poder ‘I can’t make it,’ expressing not only their unwillingness to go, but also, perhaps, disapproval of the trip. Few of the responses are completely audible on the recordings I make of the meeting. I write in my field notes that this method seems to be barely more effective than calling for a vote.
Discussion of Recording in the Field
The encounters described in the ethnographic vignettes are typical of my experiences recording women in community meetings. Their input was both invisible – inaudible – and yet key to the workings of the development projects that I observed and participated in. I wondered if the engineer in Vignette 1 realized how insulting his code-switch was, and how rude it was to speak to someone in Quechua in the words he chose, as if addressing a child. I wondered whether the second engineer, in Vignette 3, realized that the woman who giggled and asked him about what would happen if a tree were broken would veto her family’s participation in the project that evening at home. I saw how the content of the public meeting in Vignette 2 was discussed and how decisions were made among family in a private setting following the meeting, and I later understood that most of the issues that were discussed in the meeting in Vignette 4 had already been determined through private conversations and in personal networks before the meeting was held.
When I was ready to do language ideologies interviews, I was confident that I would be able to find participants who were willing to talk to me. I selected households at random, using the water utility’s list of members, and used my in-laws’ formidable web of contacts to get introductions. One woman seemed pleased and intrigued to meet me, but when we set an appointment to meet for a recording, she was not at home. This happened three times. One time, visiting unannounced, I caught her at home with a friend and they talked on record, nervously, for about two minutes. Then they suddenly discovered they had an urgent errand they had to attend to. Finally, I gave up.
Another time, I asked a friend of mine to wear a recorder around her neck. She took it off after about thirty seconds, saying she was worried it would swing into the pot where lunch was cooking and get ruined. On yet another day, I recorded three older women. They professed complete ignorance and amazement about the workings of my little recording gadget. At the time, cell phones and digital audio players were not common in town. None of the women was familiar with technology. At most, they had completed a few years of formal schooling, and had spent their lives cooking, cleaning, raising children, and tending livestock. I left the recorder running while I went out to buy some sodas, hoping they would forget about it, and me. When I got back, it had been switched off, and nobody could tell me how it had happened.
Other women promised to give me an interview, but only when their husbands were present. Then they let their husbands talk to me while they ran back and forth making lunch and serving us sweet fruit juice. In one case, I interviewed a man who I knew only through his wife, who sold chicken from her house. When I asked to interview her, and she immediately declined and offered to introduce me to her husband, who spoke with me not only willingly and at length but with great assurance and authority. “What kind of work do you do?” I asked, a question on my list. “I’m a teacher,” he told me. “My wife is a housewife.” I knew from other consultants that because he was completely blind, he had not worked as a teacher for at least twenty years, and indeed could not walk out of the house without his wife’s arm to guide him.
In my recordings and transcripts, women were both elusive and pervasive. Seldom could I get someone to sit down and chat with me while the recorder was running unless I shared a truly intimate relationship with them (for this reason, many of my recordings are of close family members and friends). When I asked for interviews, I was told that I should speak to someone who was a “real Iscamayeño,” a term that refers to a person who was born in the town and whose family has lived there a long time, but which also has racial overtones; I was told I should interview someone who knew how to speak good Spanish, not the inferior, mixed-up variety that most of my consultants said they spoke.
Slowly, I learned what was obvious from the beginning – public speaking was not seen as a feminine skill. Marina, one of the few women who served as a community representative, emphasized to me that she was always terrible at declamation contests in school.
I’ve never liked it, you know, speaking, making speeches. At school I never could do it. When they ma-, made me stand up to present … that was my greatest fear. I hated it. I got up there and didn’t know what to say.Footnote 4
And yet this public silence did not equal powerlessness or voicelessness – not in the least. Marina was an active and well-regarded member of the Town Council for two three-year terms before retiring from public service. She told me that given her lack of formal education, she hadn’t been sure she would like being a community representative, but that once she had tried it no lo hallaba tan difícil ‘I didn’t find it so hard.’ Marina said these words with dry humor, as if sharing an inside joke with me, clearly disdainful of the incompetence and corruption for which Bolivian politicians – mostly educated men with high social status – are well known. I found that women were frequently the driving force behind major development projects; without their participation and consent, any project was doomed. Their participation was off-record, expressed through the feminine genres of chisme ‘gossip,’ frank conversations among intimates, shades of expression, and remarks made at the outskirts of the meeting and passed on to the floor.
Indeed, many of the women I worked with were quite actively engaged in establishing the limits of their willingness to participate, both in development projects and in taking the floor in community meetings. Several women expressed to me in private that they felt ashamed, pasaba vergüenza, when attention was called to them in public. I have no doubt that this was true. Yet, over time, I came to see their refusal to engage in these contexts not just as a lack of ability, but as a way of rejecting the value system of a public sphere in which they were treated as less than full participants because of their lack of schooling, illiteracy, poverty, and discomfort with speaking in the elegant, flowery language associated with oratoria. Instead, they turned to their kitchens, children, livestock, and fields, where value was assigned primarily on hard work, reliability, generosity, and participation in kin and community networks of exchange. When called on to participate in formal contexts, they did so on their own terms and in their own ways, as the ethnographic data that I present in this chapter indicates.
Women’s ability to use formal oratorical styles is in some sense beyond the point. The point is that they are aware of the genre of interviews and community meetings which call for the linguistic style of oratoria – a type of speech that includes not only statistical distributions of linguistic features, but also bodily habitus, the willingness to call attention to oneself, and the nerve and daring to go on-record and risk being harshly judged. The choice to engage or not to engage in these sociolinguistic contexts is one of a variety of methods that women use to position themselves as a certain type of person, but it is important to recognize that their resistance and refusal to engage in oratorical contexts does not in the least exclude them from participation in community decision-making and projects. As such, the choice to remain silent – or to speak off-the-record – is a powerful form of social action that women use to control the way they position themselves and the way they are perceived in the community.
Data 2: Case Studies
Women who orient to the traditional value system resisted being placed in situations in which they might be expected to use oratory, a genre of speech that they might not control. Moving from the larger sense of social control to the more specific sense of sociolinguistic control or style-shifting, how can we differentiate between a lack of control of a particular speech style and a refusal to employ a register which one may in fact control? In this section, I turn to specific analysis of the linguistic patterns of two speakers, both women who orient to a traditional value system, who are pushed into formal speech situations. While they are similar in their positioning as traditional women who resist being placed in a context in which a formal genre of speech is expected, they have different ways of adapting to the speech situation in which they find themselves.
Prima
Prima was about 60 years old at the time of recording and had four adult children, all enrolled in the university or university graduates. She was of alteña ‘rural highland’ background, and regularly returned to the highlands for seasonal crop sowing and harvest. Her husband was a successful farmer who owned valuable land close to the center of town, and their home, which was built of cement with finished floors and walls, was located on a desirable lot near the center of town. In addition, Prima owned a vacant lot a little further from the center, where she raised chickens for family consumption. Prima wore a straight skirt, not pollera, and neither spoke nor understood Quechua, although her older sister wore pollera. She was very reluctant to attend meetings and several times commented to me that she was not the meeting “type.”
Prima participated in my recordings in two contexts. The first was a language ideologies interview at which her husband was also present, while the second was a more relaxed interview about kitchen practices. The latter interview served as a pre-condition for receiving a rebuilt stove from a non-governmental development organization I worked with. Because of the subject matter, this interview dealt with a topic about which women, especially rural women who cooked on wood-burning stoves, felt they had special expertise. While it was difficult to impossible to get women to participate in the language ideologies interviews (Prima participated only because I was renting a room in her home and she found it difficult to avoid me), they participated willingly and even enthusiastically in the kitchen practices interviews.
In the following quantitative analysis, I examine the distribution of a set of linguistic features in Spanish in Prima’s language ideologies interview versus in her kitchen interview. The features are arranged in order of their occurrence in meetings versus conversational contexts across the entire corpus of transcribed recordings from my 2008 fieldwork, totaling 480 minutes (see Figure 9.1). I chose many of these features because they are cases of semantic convergence with Quechua (see Table 9.1); two (o sea and lo que) are not contact-related, but are notably more frequent in more formal speech contexts.
Figure 9.1 Features in Order of Formality
Table 9.1 Informal-Formal Discourse Features
| Feature | Gloss | References |
|---|---|---|
| saber as habitual marker (cf. soler) | to be accustomed to | Pfänder (Reference Pfänder, Díaz, Ludwig and Pfänder2002: 235–6) |
| pues | so | Mendoza (Reference Mendoza2008: 228), Calvo Pérez (Reference Calvo Pérez and Pérez2000: 98–100), Escobar (Reference 226Escobar2000: 136–7), Pfänder (Reference Pfänder2009: 126–30) |
| -ito, -ita | Diminutive morphology | Escobar (Reference Escobar, Hualde, Olarrea and O’Rourke2012: 81) |
| nomás | just | Mendoza (Reference Mendoza2008: 228), Calvo Pérez (Reference Calvo Pérez and Pérez2000: 100–2), Escobar (Reference 226Escobar2000: 137), and Pfänder (Reference Pfänder2009: 130–3) |
| ya | already | Cerrón-Palomino (Reference Cerrón-Palomino2003: 250–1), Calvo Pérez (Reference Calvo Pérez and Pérez2000: 80–96), Escobar (Reference 226Escobar2000: 138), and Pfänder (Reference Pfänder2009: 118–21) |
| siempre | always, entirely | Mendoza (Reference Mendoza2008: 228), Calvo Pérez (Reference Calvo Pérez and Pérez2000: 77–80), and Pfänder (Reference Pfänder2009: 124–6) |
| también | also | Cerrón-Palomino (Reference Cerrón-Palomino2003: 246–8), Calvo Pérez (Reference Calvo Pérez and Pérez2000: 90–4), Escobar (Reference 226Escobar2000: 137), and Pfänder (Reference Pfänder2009: 134–5) |
| hacer as causative marker | caused to | Escobar (Reference 226Escobar2000: 128) |
| o sea | that is | Not contact-related |
| lo que | what/which + complementizer | Not contact-related |
While all these words are Spanish, the use of many of the words most common in informal contexts are related to Quechua influence, as discussed in more detail in the works cited in Table 9.1. At the far right of Figure 9.1 are the features most likely to appear in meetings, the Spanish discourse markers o sea “that is” and lo que “what [complementizer],” which are common in formal genres of speech across the Spanish-speaking world. The latter words are by far most common in formal types of contexts.
Figure 9.1 illustrates the likelihood that features will occur in conversations, contexts in which people tend to orient to ideas of tradition and intimacy (represented by positive values on the chart), versus the likelihood that they will occur in meetings, contexts in which people tend to orient towards formal, modern ideas (represented by negative values on the chart). The chart is ordered based on the difference between the distribution of features over meetings and conversations in the entire corpus. That is, if 64 percent of occurrences of pues are in conversations, versus 17 percent in meetings, then pues receives an index of 0.47.
In Figure 9.2, Prima’s incidence of contact features in the less formal, traditionally oriented kitchen interview is marked with dark gray bars, while her incidence of contact features in the more formal language ideologies interview is marked with light gray bars. Therefore, one would expect the DARK bars, for informal contexts, to be higher on the left and lower on the right, and the LIGHT bars, for formal contexts, to follow the opposite pattern.
Figure 9.2 Prima Kitchen Interview vs. Language Ideologies Interview
The scale of the graph is based on the number of occurrences of a particular feature divided by the number of words in the section of transcript in question and multiplied by 1,000. Where no bar is present, the word did not occur in this transcript. While these charts are useful for visualization purposes, the small number of data points precludes statistical analysis.Footnote 5
Impressionistically, it seems that Prima follows the general patterns of distribution of contact features, using more formal features in the light gray language ideologies interview and more informal features in the dark gray kitchen interview. This impression concords with my observations of her speech in the two contexts. The following transcriptions give a further illustration of the differences that I observed. In Transcript 1, taken from my language ideologies interview, Prima is on her best linguistic behavior, talking about her hope that her children would study English. (N, in Turn 11, is her husband.)
Transcript 1
P (Prima), A (Anna), N (Nicolás, Prima’s husband)
| 1. P: En cambio yo harto he deseado que mi hija antes entre a estudiar inglés. | 1. P: On the other hand, I always wished that my daughter would study English. |
| 2. A: Mhm | 2. A: Mm-hmm |
| 3. P: También, Nelly, Nestor, y así como que, allá. Si hay, no ve, para llevar, puro ingles, no ve? | 3. P: Also, Nelly, Nestor, and so on, over there. There is, isn’t there, to study, just English, right? |
| 4. A: Hay | 4. A: There is. |
| 5. P: Hay, pues, pa salir y, de, profesora de inglés están, no ve? | 5. P: There is, to graduate and, be an English teacher they’re there, right? |
| 6. A: Sí, sí, sí. Hay eso. | 6. A: Yes, yes, yes. There is that. |
| 7. P: Y, ellos, no han tenido interés. Igual el Henry. Ha hecho dos, tres meses, parece, inglés, | 7. P: And they, weren’t interested. Henry was the same. He did two, three months, I think, of English, |
| 8. A: Mhm | 8. A: Mm-hmm |
| 9. P: Y de ahí lo ha dejado también. Porque ya también, no podía alcanzar, si, | 9. P: And then he stopped too. Because at that point, he couldn’t [afford], and, |
| 10. A: M, sí. | 10. A: Mm, yes. |
| 11. N: M | 11. N: M |
| 12. P: Yy, lo ha dejado así. Y, es bien es saber [el in]. De los dos. | 12. P: And, so he just stopped. And, it’s good to know [En-]. Both. |
| 13. A: A ha | 13. A: Uh-huh |
| 14. P: Entender. | 14. P: To understand. |
In Transcript 1, Prima used formal-sounding phrases such as en cambio “on the other hand” and así como que “such that” (Turns 1, 3); she also used también twice in Turn 9. As noted in Babel (Reference Babel2011), this contact feature is used and over-used when speakers are trying to establish a formal register. Prima was clearly monitoring her speech; she was fairly disfluent, she corrected herself in Turn 12, and phrased her statements as questions in Turns 3 and 5. In the first line, Prima’s e vowel was slightly raised (boldface and underlined), a telltale and highly salient Quechua contact feature. Later in the conversation she asked me, Usted va a pasar clases alll, a su idioma de Usted, o no? “Will you [formal] be teaching classes innnn, in your [formal] language, or not?” The use of the formal person Usted, which she rarely used with me in more casual settings, is one more sign of a formal style of speech; she drew attention to this by using the explicit pronoun twice in this short sentence (Spanish does not require explicit pronouns). Prima certainly didn’t need to use the formal pronoun with me, a much younger woman and a renter in her house; rather, by doing so, she cast herself as a polite and educated person in an effort to live up to the interview context.
Prima varied her use of contact features to fit different situations. For example, in Transcript 2 below, taken from our more relaxed kitchen practices interview, she made suggestions about how to improve the cooking stove that she obtained from an NGO.
Transcript 2
P (Prima), A (Anna)
| 1. P: Y yo decía, Anita, sabís que decía? | 1. P: I was thinking, Anita, you know what I was thinking? |
| 2. A: Mhm | 2. A: Uh-huh? |
| 3. P: Que si no hubiera tenido el ladrillo, fuera solamente el fierro, | 3. P: What if it didn’t have the brick, if it were just the metal [ring]. |
| 4. A: Mhm | 4. A: Uh-huh |
| 5. P: Eso más bien quería yo Anna decir. Que tenga solamente ese fierro, y tenía las patitas, que no tenga el ladrillo para que, tenga más campito adentro! Si asicito es el campito! | 5. P: That’s what I was thinking, instead, Anna. That it should just have the metal [ring], and the feet, and not the brick so that it, has more space inside! It’s this tiny, that space! |
| 6. A: Mm, ya ya ya ya. | 6. A: Mm, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 7. P: No ve? Mientras más campito, más ponimos leñita y más bracea, más calda va. | 7. P: Right? When there’s more space, we put more wood and it burns better, it heats more. |
I interviewed Prima in the role of a representative of the NGO, running through a cooking-practices questionnaire with her. In Transcript 2, Prima responded to the question, “How could the stove be improved?” Although Prima had a number of serious complaints about the stoves, she was worried that direct criticisms might be offensive or place me in a difficult position. She invoked our close relationship through intimate forms of address (the vos conjugation of the verb sabís, the diminutive Anita) and through a pronounced φw in the words fuera and fierro (in boldface, Turns 3 and 5). Both these features are closely linked to rural female speakers from the countryside. She used the raised-vowel form of sabés [sabís] “you know” and ponemos [ponimos] “we know” (Turns 1 and 7, in boldface). She also used negative politeness strategies (cf. Brown and Levinson Reference Brown and Levinson1987), focusing on the fact that it’s “just me” that is giving this advice, using subjunctive verb forms in Turn 3, and a proliferation of diminutives (patitas “little feet,” Turn 5; campito “little space,” Turn 5, 6; and leñita “little sticks,” Turn 7).
In Transcript 1, Prima sounded somewhat uncomfortable and disfluent, but she did produce a formal-sounding style of speech. In Transcript 2, on the other hand, she sounded quite at home, using contact features dexterously to maintain a polite and friendly relationship while giving constructive criticism. Prima used these features to index a close personal relationship, one that for her was rooted in tradition and in traditional values of respect and politeness.
We learn from these data that Prima could, in fact, modify her style of speech when she was obligated to participate in a context that she perceived as being more formal. While she was reluctant to participate in these contexts, this reluctance masked an ability to control a more formal genre of speech. Refusal to engage in formal speech situations does not equal a lack of control in the sociolinguistic sense.
Juana
Juana, the second speaker, was in her early 50s at the time of recording and had six children ranging from elementary-school age to early 30s. Juana and Prima were next-door neighbors and were both originally from the highlands surrounding Iscamayo. Juana, like Prima, wore a straight skirt rather than pollera. While Juana regularly attended meetings, such as the Parent-Teacher Organization, the Mother’s Club, and other community organizations, she seldom made public statements on the floor, limiting her participation to private comments and off-the-record conversation.
Juana maintained a dense network of social connections in the area, treating families from the surrounding rural areas with respect and affection. People characterized Juana favorably as friendly, kind, and generous, as well as hardworking and unpretentious. Juana was well known in town as a hard worker and a dependable person in a pinch. She frequently worked for wealthy Iscamayo matrons, taking care of their children, washing clothes, or assisting with food preparation for large social events. Her knowledge of the families of Iscamayo was encyclopedic. These characteristics – a hard worker with a “dense, multiplex” social network (cf. Milroy and Milroy Reference Milroy and Milroy1992) – are one of the premiere expressions of value within the “traditional” system.
In my quantitative analysis, I examine an instance in which she assisted me with an interview with another individual – an older woman from the countryside who could be considered a peer of Juana’s. I compare this to a meeting in which she discussed the stove project with an audience of people who were interested in acquiring a stove. In the latter context, she was visibly and audibly nervous, in contrast to the former, in which she acted as an expert in guiding the conversation.
As in Prima’s data above, one would expect the DARK bars, for informal contexts, to be higher on the left and lower on the right, and the LIGHT bars, for formal contexts, to follow the opposite pattern. The scale of the graph is based on the number of occurrences of a particular feature divided by the number of words in the section of transcript in question and multiplied by 1,000. As above, the small number of data points precludes statistical analysis.
Juana’s use of linguistic variables was not as consistent as Prima’s. While she used the features at the extreme left (pues) and extreme right (o sea, lo que) of the graph as would be expected, the intermediate features show variation that is inconsistent with general patterns of use. This quantitative analysis suggests that Juana employed a less formal register in the meeting context than did Prima in the language ideologies interview.
It is tempting to characterize Juana’s performance through a deficit model. She does not control a formal register; she is not aware of the conventions of oratory; she has less ability to style-shift than does Prima. Indeed, a community insider with whom I discussed this data questioned whether Juana “has a meeting voice.” Yet this is at best a partial truth. Juana’s use of language in the meeting is more agentive than this view would suggest.
This impression is borne out by a close examination of the meeting transcript, which is reproduced in part in Transcript 3. As is evident at first glance, the first speaker, Enrique, employs an oratorical style with high-flown vocabulary that is essentially a monologue; Juana’s turns, on the other hand, are short and conversational.
Figure 9.3 Juana Conversation vs. Juana Meeting
Transcript 3
J (Juana), E (Enrique), F (Froilán)
| 1. E: Increíble pero fue así. Y en ahí pude yo tam’ien, apr-, digamos, aprovechar de lo que hicieron, digamos, el, preparado un, como unn, todos los, los que iban, iban mirando [la realidad]. Tenía bienn el sabor, entonces. Y hoy, en otra ocasion también, volví a , volvieron a hacer, en otro lugar, igual. Vi pero que en realidad, estas cocinas son, especialmente para aquellas personas que, quieren, poca [..]dad. Yo en, en mi casa, la mayoría, casi la mayoría de los días es que [pruebo] para diez personas. Pero algunas veces, doce. Peroo, en todo ese tiempo, me he dado cuenta que en realidad, para que funcione bien estas cocinas, tienen que ser unas leñas que tengan peso. Y así tiene la leña peso, y funciona bien. Puede hacer hervir para más. Yo confío bien en este. Lo único […] es por un lado, […] ha hecho coser. Eso es. | 1. E: It’s incredible but that’s how it was. And in that I could appr-, let’s say, take advantage of what they made, let’s say, the, preparation of a, like umm, everyone who went, was seeing the reality of it. It had a gooood flavor, then. And now, on another occasion also, I returned, they returned to do it, in another place, the same again. I saw thus that in reality, these stoves are, specially made for those people who want little […]. I, in my home, mostly, most days it’s that I [serve] for ten people. But some days, twelve. Buuut, in all this time, I’ve realized that in reality, in order for these stoves to work well, one has to use the firewood that has good weight. And so when the firewood is heavy, it works well. It can even make it boil for more [people]. I trust this [stove] well. The only […] is on the one hand […] made it cook. That’s all. |
| 2. F: Eeeso. [10-second pause] | 2. F: Thaaat’s it. [10-second pause] |
| 3. J: <laugh> | 3. J: <laugh> |
| 4. J: Bueno, en lo de las cocinas a leña, yo veo que muy económicas son. O sea, uno se trae su leña, y, si quiere, si quiere hacer las cositas rápido, y bueno, el cosito es pequeño, pue, para poner leña. | 4. J: Well, in terms of the wood stoves, I find them very economical. That is, one brings one’s firewood, and if one wants, if one wants to do things quickly, well, the thingy is small, you see, to put firewood in. |
| 5. F: Así ha de ser, ha de ser. | 5. F: Must be so, must be. |
| 6. J: Y, uno agarra, s-, le pone una, pedacito así pequeño también por arriba, y, y eso arde como si estuviera apurándose con su, con un, así tronco. | 6. J: And, one grabs it, a-, one puts a little bitty piece on top, too, and, and it burns as if it were being hurried with its, with a, like a big log. |
| 7. F: Mm | 7. F: Mmmm |
| 8. J: Arde bien. | 8. J: It burns well. |
| 9. F: Baa | 9. F: Huuuh |
| 10. J: Y hace cocer su comida rápido. | 10. J: And it cooks one’s food quickly. |
| 11. F: Baa | 11. F: Huuuh |
| 12. J: Yo, cuando no tengo gas, es directo a la, ahí a la cocina. Rápido arde, hasta que mis hijos se van a la escuela, y [hasta que vuelven Uds] yo vengo tarde de allá, | 12. J: I, when I don’t have gas, I go directly to this stove. It burns quickly, and by the time my children leave for school, and [by the time you come home] I come back late from over there, |
| 13. F: Hm | 13. F: Hmm |
| 14. J: Y, hago cocer mote, hago cocer, cualquier cosa | 14. J: And, I cook boiled corn, I cook, anything |
| 15. F: Baa | 15. F: Huuuh |
| 16. J: es como si tuviera uno con esas otras leñitas, digamos, cocinitas a leña si. | 16. J: it’s as if one had one with those other pieces of firewood, that is, wood stoves. |
| 17. F: Baa | 17. F: Huuuh |
| 18. J: Solamente hay que estar continuoo apurándole. | 18. J: Only you have to be there feeding the fire all the time. |
| 19. F: Aa | 19. F: Aaah |
| 20. J: Pero si es leña buena, como dice Enrique, si es fina la leña, | 20. J: But if the wood is good, as Enrique says, if the firewood is good quality, |
| 21. F: Más calda tiene. | 21. F: It burns hotter. |
| 22. J: Sí. Sigue ardiendo, le apuro otra vez, y aparte que no junta mucha ceniza si. | 22. J: Yes. It keeps burning, I hurry it up a little, and also it’s true that it doesn’t produce too much ash. |
| 23. F: Hmm. | 23. F: Hmmm |
The meeting began with general chatter (not shown in this segment of the transcript). I was demonstrating some stoves to a few people who had come to see them, while Juana and another community member, Enrique, chatted with their neighbors. Both Juana and Enrique had been using the stoves for more than a year and were present at my invitation to act as experts in discussing the stoves with potential users. After I made a few remarks, I ceded the floor to Enrique, who gave a fairly florid speech filled with oratorical flourishes and dramatic prosodic features. Enrique’s turns were long and he addressed the audience with considerable confidence. Enrique’s last turn is reproduced in Turn 1 in Transcript 3.
At this point, I turned to Juana. My recollection of the moment is that she gave me a wide-eyed stare, silently but expressively performing surprise at being asked to take the floor and unwillingness to do so. There is a full 10 seconds of silence on the recording as this exchange takes place. But she eventually stood up and exchanged places with Enrique, beginning to speak with a short, nervous laugh.
In her first turns (Lines 4 and 6), Juana stumbled a bit, using the generic subject uno ‘one’ and vocabulary such as ‘economical’ and o sea ‘that is,’ one of the most common discourse markers in oratorical style. With the support of an elderly man in the audience, however, she soon found her stride. This man, whom I refer to by the pseudonym Froilán, was a lifelong agricultural laborer from the countryside. He responded with frequent positive minimal feedback to Juana’s discussion, at one point finishing a sentence for her (Line 21). As she continued to address the audience, Juana began to speak to them as if to a group of friends, addressing them directly as Usted(es), the polite form of “you,” which is an appropriate address term for ritual kin and between adults who are not intimates. She began to appeal to shared knowledge: the familiar rhythm of sending children off to school, cooking soup in the morning for the afternoon meal. Although she referred to the man who spoke before her simply as “Enrique” in Line 20, she later referred to two women from the community using the honorific Doña (not reproduced in this section of the transcript). As she continued speaking, Froilán’s contributions overlapped with hers more and more, and her turns became shorter as his became longer, until the speech became a discussion. After a few minutes, another audience member and I also began contributing observations.
Over the course of this 10-minute recording, Juana shifted the genre of the meeting event to something more like a testimonial. The testimonial is a familiar genre, widely heard on radio advertisements, in which comadres and compadres ‘ritual co-parents’ address each other in exaggerated country accents, using polite address forms such as Usted “you [formal]” and Doñ(a), an honorific address form. Like stigmatized dialects in other areas in the world, such as the American South, these features are intended to convey artless sincerity, sometimes humor, and above all, reliable recommendations. While Juana’s discussion is not precisely the same type of performance as these radio advertisements, it fits within the model of a friendly conversation between people of similar social status and backgrounds. Ultimately, her “speech” became a four-way conversation between herself, Froilán, me, and the other audience member.
Juana did not demonstrate the ability to style-shift that Prima did in Transcripts 1 and 2. However, while we have no positive evidence of her sociolinguistic control of the genre of oratory, she did demonstrate a great deal of control over the situation through her ability to shift the style of the discourse setting from oratory to testimonial. This situational control is a sign of her own dexterity in adapting to the situation in which she found herself, positioning herself not as an expert, but as a neighbor and friend. Juana’s initial resistance to being pressed into an oratorical role also expressed her positioning within the traditional value system.
Discussion
Both Prima and Juana, in their different ways, fit into the category of the traditional woman from the countryside. Both resisted participating in formal settings in which oratorical types of speech might be expected. However, they had different ways of adapting to these situations when they were forced into them. Prima largely replicated the general sociolinguistic patterns of oratorical features used by speakers at meetings – an ability that would have been invisible had she not been forced to participate in this context. Juana, on the other hand, continued to employ informal types of speech. Rather than conform to a set of norms that she might not fully control, she styled her contribution as a testimonial. Seen this way, Juana was an active participant in constructing a context in which she felt comfortable participating.
Given my observations of and conversations with these women, as well as others who shared their positioning, I suggest that this reluctance and refusal should not be interpreted as a sign of lack of control in either the sociolinguistic or the broader societal sense. Prima clearly demonstrated an ability to shift styles in the two situations examined here. Juana, despite her apparent lack of a “meeting voice,” demonstrated considerable ability to shape speech events, both in guiding the conversation she participated in and in casting her participation in the meeting as a testimonial. Reluctance and refusal, far from demonstrating a lack of competence, are part of a conspicuous orientation to a traditional value system in which women are not denigrated for their relative lack of formal education and oratorical ability, but rather fulfill an important role as hard workers and valuable members of kin and ritual social networks.
Conclusion
The data that I examine in this chapter show that awareness of a particular style or genre of discourse as part of a larger social system leads speakers to control their participation in situations in which they would be expected to employ particular sociolinguistic features. In doing so, I consider (at least) two types of control: control in the sense in which it has been used in previous work in sociolinguistics, that is, the use of sociolinguistic variables over different social contexts; and control in the broader sense of negotiating one’s participation in a social situation. Likewise, awareness is multifaceted: speakers may or may not be aware of particular variables, but they are certainly aware of the existence of expectations regarding language use by particular speakers in particular situations. At this level, both awareness and control are related to larger-scale social systems of power and privilege. This broader sense of awareness and control has not been examined seriously or explicitly enough in the existing literature, although it has sometimes been assumed or referenced. Even when examined in isolation, sociolinguistic variables act as part of a complex semiotic web of features, each with its own set of associations that affects the way in which people use and understand them in particular social contexts.
I frame this argument with reference to the literature on silence, which scholars have argued must be considered in relation to speech and social context: Prima’s and Juana’s practices of resistance are recognizable only in relation to sociolinguistic norms at the community level. These norms are locally constructed and produced through forms of practice. Factors such as gender, class, and social standing are all relevant in the use and interpretation of particular instances of silence or indirection. The refusal to use the oratorical genre where it is expected is itself a form of resistance. People can demonstrate control, then, not only through the use of particular patterns of features, but also through resistance to general community norms or through refusal to speak.
Awareness and control function at multiple levels of recognition and at multiple cognitive levels, as demonstrated by Campbell-Kibler (this volume). However, when we consider these levels, we also must attend to the way in which language users understand social norms and position themselves with respect to social groups. Preston invokes Dell Hymes in suggesting that we should be able to “cut across” these different levels of consciousness by moving beyond a conscious-unconscious dichotomy and focusing on the “common ground” of the complexity of social attitudes (this volume, p. 183). I argue in this chapter that we must be sensitive to the many different ways in which people can express or respond to these attitudes. Speakers’ production may or may not constitute strong evidence that they control (or don’t control) a particular set of features. The ability to control features is not the same as the choice to use them; and the choice to avoid a particular style or set of features is not the same as a lack of control.
In addition to evidence of speakers’ control of particular sociolinguistic variables, we must also consider the role of power and resistance in shaping speakers’ strategies and participation in social situations such as the meetings and interviews I discuss. When the women who I describe in this chapter are called upon to produce public, on-the-record discourse, they actively resist the “oratorical” role, producing speech that positions them according to an alternative system of value. However, this resistance may mask an ability to produce linguistic forms that conform to the conventions of formal or oratorical speech, and it certainly is not indicative of a lack of control in the larger social sense. Therefore, we must be careful not to characterize non-conformity to sociolinguistic norms as a “lack” of control. Reluctance and refusal constitute a different kind of monitoring and self-control, perhaps more difficult to measure and quantify, but just as real as on-the-record speech.
