Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research

(CIQR -- "seeker")

(E-mail memo:  Jan. 23, 2007)

NEXT MEETING: 

Feb. 15 (Thurs.), 2007, 4:00-5:30PM,

Berger Gallery 207 College Hall, Duquesne University.

  Dr. Barbara Johnstone

Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics, Dept. of English, Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Johnstone is editor of Language in Society and author of Repetition in Arabic Discourse (Benjamins, 1990),  Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America (Indiana UP, 1990), The Linguistic Individual (Oxford, 1996), and two textbooks, Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics (Oxford, 2001), and Discourse Analysis (Blackwell, 2002) in addition to many articles and book chapters.  Her recurrent interests have to do with how people evoke and shape places in talk and with what can be learned by taking the perspective of the individual on language and discourse.   Her current work is about dialect and locality in the Pittsburgh (US) area.

Presentation:

Narrating Pittsburghese

Abstract:
Geographic mobility associated with the globalizing economy results at the same time in the collapse of distinctions among regional varieties and in increased popular attention to regional variation. This is because the social and economic conditions that cause people to speak more alike are, paradoxically, the same as those that give rise to the activities in which "dialects" are constructed as shared representations of ways of talking linked to places.  To explore one such activity, this paper employs a Proppian analysis of stories about newcomers' first encounters with Pittsburghers and Pittsburghers' travels outside the city.  Drawing on work by linguistic anthropologists Michael Silverstein, Asif Agha, and others on the discursive processes through which sets of linguistic forms get linked ideologically with social and personal identities, I argue that narrative plots help create shared orientations to particular sets of nonstandard linguistic features and link them indexically with region.  I suggest that narrative is a particularly good vehicle for language-ideological differentiation, because conversational narrative requires evaluation, and hyperbole and simplification are good evaluative techniques.

MINUTES of  Feb. 15, 2007:

Dr. Barbara Johnstone, Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics, Dept. of English, Carnegie Mellon University, presented her paper, Narrating Pittsburghese.   Professor Johnstone argued that narrative plots help to create shared orientations to particular sets of nonstandard linguistic features (such as locutions specific to Pittsburgers) and link them to specific regions.  She showed how narrative is a good vehicle for language-ideological differentiation, because conversational narrative requires evaluation, and hyperbole and simplification are good evaluative techniques.  The presentation was followed by discussion of the theoretical and methodological aspects of her work as well as the specific results.