CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Mary Bucholtz (Dept of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara): " Styling, Quoting, and California Youth Identities in Interaction " November 2, 2005, 5pm. Haines 332.

It has been well established by sociolinguists that forms such as be like and be all are in widespread use as quotative markers among youth in a number of English-speaking countries More recently, researchers have reported that the distribution of innovative forms is not uniform but depends heavily on speakers' social identities or styles, which can be uncovered only through close discourse analysis as well as in-depth ethnographic analysis of the local social order in which speakers live their everyday lives. The present paper builds on this work by considering how social identities are forged not merely through quantitative patterns of preferred quotative forms within social groups but more importantly through the individual speaker's selection of a particular quotative at a particular moment in discourse to perform a particular interactional function. Drawing on interactional data from students at a Northern California high school, the paper examines how quotative markers pattern in discourse within as well as across locally salient and oppositionally defined social groups such as popular people, nerds, and hip hop fans. The analysis reveals that specific innovative quotative forms, imbued with specific semiotic associations, are not static markers of sociolinguistic identity but flexible indexical tools for creating affective and epistemic stances that position the speaker stylistically in relation to her speech and her interlocutors. The findings argue for the necessity of enriching quantitative sociolinguistic analysis with qualitative discourse analysis and ethnography to arrive at a more complete picture of linguistic style.