Iconicity in Persona Style

Iconicity in Persona Style Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the Indexical Field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:4. 

This kind of style (what one might call persona style) is orthogonal to the formality continuum that is associated with style in traditional variation studies (e.g. Labov 1972). The focus on formality in these studies keeps the study of variation in the cognitive realm (see Eckert 2004) as it determines the amount of attention paid to speech, limiting stylistic agency to the manipulation of status in the socio-economic hierarchy.    (Eckert 2008)

    Formality seems like a promising site of iconicity. If formality is understood as amount of attention paid to speech and iconicity is alignment of speech with meaning, it may be that more formal speech is more iconic? But this conflicts with the low status of iconicity. 

The rhotacization of syllable finals (giving vowels a retroflex quality) and the realization of retroflex initial obstruents as [ ] is popularly seen as giving Beijing Mandarin an ‘oily’ quality, which in turn is associated with an oily character: the ‘Beijing Smooth Operator,’ jing you-zi, recognized in the public imagination, including the literature of Beijing writers, as a male Beijing type. This is someone who is smooth and streetwise, who can handle all kinds of situations, and who can talk his way out of situations, who has the ‘gift of gab.’ The salience of this type showed up in Zhang’s conversations with managers. Referring to rhotacization as ‘swallowing sound,’ one of the managers commented, ‘Beijingers are glib, talk fast, like to swallow sounds, hence appear to be smooth’ (Zhang 2005: 443). The connection between the sound of rhotacization and oiliness and between oiliness and a specific persona is a particularly striking example of iconization (Irvine and Gal 2000). Even more striking is the comment recorded by Zhang comparing Beijing speech to southern dialects, attributing rhotacization to a physical quality or ability: ‘Have you ever heard anybody saying the Cantonese have “oily accent, slippery tone”? That’s because their tongues can’t curl’ (Zhang 2008). As shown in Figure 2, the yuppie style downplays local Beijing features. But while male yuppies use the Smooth Operator feature less than the state managers, they use it considerably more than the female yuppies – indeed, the female yuppies use it very little. It appears that this feature does not fit the persona required of a woman in the foreign sector. (Eckert, 2008, p. 460)

The managers in Zhang’s study pointed specifically to the Alley Saunterer when discussing this variable: ‘Mine is not the real Beijing Mandarin, because I’m not one of those Alley Saunterers . . . They speak the authentic Beijing speech. And they say “big cabbage” [ta paitshai] as [ta paitθhai]’ (Zhang 2005: 443). In an example of iconization similar to that discussed above regarding the Smooth Operator, another manager characterized Alley Saunterers as ‘big-tongued’ since they ‘bite their tongues when talking.’ While the Alley Saunterer image is not useful to the male or female cosmopolitan yuppie persona or to women in state-owned businesses, a little use of it works for state businessmen. (Eckert, 2008, p. 461)

In all three cases, the meaning is based in ideologies about what the locality is about – what kinds of people live there and what activities, beliefs, and practices make it what it is. Local identity is never an association with a generic locale but with a particular construction of that locale as distinct from some other. (Eckert, 2008, p. 462)

Michael Silverstein’s (2003) concept of indexical order … gives a foothold on the relation between the macrosociological facts and linguistic practice by providing a theoretical account of the role of construal in context in the process of indexical change. (Eckert, 2008, p. 463)

Ideology can drive lexical change as well as phonological: “The pejoration of many English words referring to females is a perfect example of the systematic absorption of ideology into the lexicon. Sally McConnell-Ginet (1989) has argued that changes such as the pejoration of hussy, originally meaning ‘housewife,’ happened over years of situated use, in which: (1) the term was used repeatedly in negative utterances about specific women or categories of women; and (2) the utterances of those who said such negative things were registered disproportionately.” (Eckert, 2008, p. 465)

In other words, the indexical values of variables are part and parcel of the ideological work of society and vice-versa – and it is for this reason that the survey studies of variation have found over and over that variables correlate with the fundamental, ideologically laden experiences of class and gender. I would argue, therefore, that no trivial meanings come to be associated with variables but that any meanings that are associated with variables will be based in highly salient ideological issues.(Eckert, 2008, p. 465)

I have left undiscussed the question of the process of bricolage and the structure of style: Are there constructions? Is stylistic meaning compositional? (Eckert, 2008, p. 472)

TO READ

Zhang, 2005 Kathryn Campbell-Kibler’s (2007a) experimental work on (ING) provides us with a starting point for thinking about how indexical fields are configured. —> This could be useful to document precisely something I see in the field. 

Rob Podesva’s work (2004, 2007) Likewise, the theory of the community of practice, which emerged from education (Lave 1988, Lave & Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998), was not applied to gender until it was imported into linguistics by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet in a highly influential survey article (1992).

speakers may end up reproducing hegemonic identities more often than resisting them, as suggested by Holmes 1997

Elsewhere (Bucholtz 1998) I describe the social identity of the nerd and detail the phonological, syntactic, lexical, and discourse practices through which nerd identity is linguistically indexed.