Language, Culture and Identity - Signs of Life by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2020-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Towards a socio-cognitive discourse approach

The self, in the context of the present study, is a socio-culturally constructed and linguistically experienced process. Many linguists and sociologists agree that the self is constructed through narration and interaction (e.g., Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Gergen 2011; Giddens 1984). The social construction of the self thus arises in the dynamic process of becoming in relation to others through language. Therefore, the building blocks of the self are embedded in communicative activities.

The close relationship between the experience of selfhood and language use has been a well-researched area of study. In the field of linguistics, analytical frameworks have been proposed to analyse the co-construction of discursive identities (e.g., Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina 2013; Ochs 1992). The notions of performance and positioning are particularly relevant to this study in terms of informing methods applied to data analysis.

The idea of performance speaks to the fact that speaking constitutes an act of identity and that being someone is a form of doing (De Fina 2013). Goffman (1959) puts forward a dramaturgical metaphor: social actors stage performances of desirable selves to save ‘face’ in situations of difficulty. This view has been mirrored in studies that focus on the significance of politeness as an interactional force that influences the outcome of the communicative acts we perform, such as Brown and Levinson’s face-management framework (1987). Goffman’s view is particularly influential among linguists and anthropologists, who have focused greatly on the symbolic capacities of language as capturing public cultural meanings embedded in each performance (e.g., Bauman 1993; Levinson 1983; Ochs 2012; Silverstein 2003).

The choices social actors make, which constitute emergent identities, can be analysed with the notion of positioning (Davies and Harré 1990). It refers to the process by which selves are located in the conversation as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced storylines (Davies and Harré 1990: 48). Through discursive practices, people situationally perceive and produce references to one another (and themselves) as social beings (Bamberg 1997: 336). From an analytical point of view, a person involved in discursive practice is called a positioning subject (Davies and Harré 1990). People position themselves with regard to others in order to “differentiate and integrate a sense of self” (Bamberg 2011: 8). These positions are central to creating meanings in interaction. What is relevant to the current analysis is that the differentiation of subject positions can constitute a means for creating space between different aspects of the individual self in discursive context. For instance, the speaker can represent oneself as someone who delivers one’s own opinion to the audience when that opinion entails a breach of social norms.

The performance-centred approach (Bamberg 1997; Bauman 1993; De Fina et al. 2006; Goffman 1974, 1981; Riessman 2003; Harrison 2011) defines speakers’ communicative acts as comprised of two dimensions, namely the judgements of the self and the perceived evaluations of others. This is because, as far as the interlocutors’ are concerned, every speech event can be a private as well as a public evaluative act. That is to say,

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