6.8 From symbols to indexes

with other social features such as stance or social relations. For example, in some dialects of English tag questions (I go straight, don’t I?) are used more often by female speakers, but they are also associated with a stance of hesitancy. To say that female gender is indexed by tag questions is then a simplification. It would be more accurate to say that tag questions index hesitancy and that hesitancy is, in turn, a stance that is associated with femininity (at least in some Englishspeaking communities). In Japanese, to use the sentence-final wa makes one’s speech sound more “gentle” (Uyeno 1971). Hence, the particle wa indexes female identity because Japanese women are expected to be more “gentle” than men. Among the police officers studied by Bonnie McElhinny (1995), women confessed to using more profanities when they first got on the job because they wanted to sound more “masculine,” even though they recognized that they might have overdone it – a case of what Labov (1972c) called “hypercorrection.” Interviews revealed that female officers saw swearing as being tough and it was the men’s alledged toughness that they wanted to match up to. Swearing becomes then one of the linguistic markers used to construct a particular type of social identity, one that includes such features as “being tough.” It is being tough, in turn, that is used to construct “masculinity” in that particular community. In the Tamil village studied by Stephen Levinson, swear words were used more frequently by members of the dominant caste (Brown and Levinson 1979: 306). In that case, swearwords construct “forcefulness,” which is in turn a characteristic of higher caste.

In each of these cases, gender identity (or other types of identities) is best seen as constituted by a variety of features, each of which is not necessarily or exclusively associated with either female or male. It is their combination and existential association with particular sets of stances and values that eventually produces one’s gender identity. A study of the linguistic constitution of gender identities forces us to understand the cultural attitudes towards particular ways of being in the world. These attitudes often subscribe to hegemonic views of social hierarchies (e.g. men are tough and strong, women are gentle and weak), but other times, they might show some resistance to such views. A review of the ethnographic literature on features usually associated with women’s ways of communicating (silence, indirectness, politeness, passivity) reveals that the same feature that in some context expresses submission in other contexts might index resistance, rejection, protest (Gal 1991). Similarly, in her discussion of how power and solidarity are expressed in discourse, Deborah Tannen warned us against the identification of certain linguistic forms with intentions to dominate. Silence, for example, does not always index feeling powerless. It can also be an instrument of power (Tannen 1993b: 177).

6.8.2.2Contextualization cues

The more we learn about indexicality, the more we realize that speaking is a con-

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Meaning in linguistic forms

tinuous process of contextualization. If talk helps establish what is going on, what one particular interaction is about, who the speakers are or who they would like to be, indexes are the basic tools that help participants negotiate such issues. They are used to clarify implicit questions such as: Where is this talk leading to? How is it relevant to what we were just talking about? Who should be talking next? What is an appropriate answer? Are we agreeing or disagreeing?

By studying multicultural settings in which people from different ethnic backgrounds come together using the “same” language, John Gumperz has identified a set of indexes, which he calls contextualization cues, that help “speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows ... These features are ... habitually used and perceived but rarely consciously noted and almost never talked about directly. Therefore they must be studied in context rather than in the abstract” (Gumperz 1982a: 131). When a speaker’s contextualization cues are misinterpreted or missed altogether, communication is in trouble and participants can end up speaking across purposes. This kind of situation is what Gumperz called crosstalk.

Gumperz (1992) showed that contextualization cues can operate at various levels of speech production, including the aspects of grammar introduced in this chapter (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) as well as (i) prosody – i.e. intonation, stress or accenting and pitch –, (ii) paralinguistic signs – e.g. whispery, breathy, husky or creaky voice –, (iii) markers of tempo, including pauses and hesitations; (iv) overlaps (see chapter 8); (v), laughter, and (vi) formulaic expressions. Given the emphasis on syntax and phonology in theoretical linguistics and the difficulty of representing paralinguistic prosodic information with traditional orthography, most of these features of talk are often left out of linguistic analysis. Gumperz’s study of interethnic communication and miscommunication has helped focus on these neglected characteristics of speech in interaction (see Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996).

Gumperz’s work connects research on linguistic structures to cultural variation. He argues that immigrants’ ability to apply for a job or get access to other economical resources is based on their ability to interpret and use the appropriate contextualization cues. This research links grammar to culture because contextualization is a universal process that produces and implies culture-specific knowledge. It is universal because it is based on the division of labor, “which in one form or another is characteristic of all human collectivities” (Gumperz 1996: 403), and it is culture-specific because division of labor implies differentiated exposure to particular communicative practices; hence, some sectors of the population are not exposed to the communicative resources necessary for gaining access to higher paid jobs. The economic separation between social groups is both the cause and

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