Variants like negative concord may be highly stigmatised because they have obvious standard alternatives in writing. But what about syntactic features that only ever occur in spoken discourse? One example of a variant that meets this criteria is right dislocation: this refers to the occurrence of a clause followed by a noun phrase or pronoun tag which is co-referential with the preceding subject or object pronoun; for instance, ’She’s lovely, her mum’ or ’I’ve not got an accent, me’. The Midlan High data shows that, unlike negative concord, right dislocation is used by all communities of practice, but there are differences in its frequency of use and, particularly, in the precise formulations of right dislocation used by different communities of practice. These differences reflect how speakers make social moves by exploiting the links between precise syntactic configuration and possible meanings. Significantly, this chapter suggests that the frequency with which certain social groups use particular syntactic constructions is a direct consequence of the need or willingness to express the pragmatic meaning the construction encodes.

Sound empirical analysis draws upon (and refines) theories about a particular set of concepts, and understanding the social meaning of grammatical variation requires that we study language as it relates to social practice and forms of social engagement. Chapter 3 interrogates how sociolinguists study social meaning and the processes involved in meaning making. It explains the concepts that we need to know to understand how social meaning develops (the sign, style, persona, social type, indexicality, character type, stance, index, icon, sound symbolism, qualia, rhematisation, indexical field, stance accretion, erasure, axis of differentiation, and enregisterment), providing detailed exemplification from the Midlan High dataset. The chapter also considers the techniques required to understand how these concepts operate (experimental perception studies, ethnography, pragmatic analysis). Given that social meaning may interact with pragmatics, this chapter also highlights the need to combine research on the pragmatics of spoken language with variationist work on the social embedding and social distribution of linguistic variables.

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for enacting social relations – mood. A basic distinction is drawn between the systems of formal mood and addressee deference on the one hand and the systems of informal mood, stance and politeness on the other. Subsequently the systems of polarity, modality, participant deference, highlight, comment and expletion are outlined. For each system the relevant choices for meaning are consolidated in system networks and their realisation in structure at clause, group/phrase and word ranks is specified.

Chapter 4 focuses on the uses of general extenders that are speaker-oriented, representing the speaker’s point of view, or the personal function, also known as subjectivity. They are also described as stance markers when used to express personal feelings, attitudes and evaluations. Clear examples of this function can be found in those adjunctive phrases with pejorative terms as proforms. Other notable examples involve extended descriptions that seem excessive, yet iconically represent an excess of work or problems. Speakers can also use some adjunctive forms to indicate that they think the accompanying information isextreme in some way or, within a formulaic construction, to express an idea that is unexpected. The disjunctive form or anything can be used to express the minimum expected and is the typical phrase used in a formulaic disclaimer. The different origins and functions of Whatever and or whatever are described and, along with some adjunctive forms used with a dismissive effect, are analyzed in terms of metapragmatic awareness.

This chapter outlines pertinent work on stance and evaluation that has emerged over the past two decades or so, with a specific focus on studies that have both catalysed and contributed to the discursive turn in sociopragmatics. Such studies share an understanding of stance taking and evaluation as intersubjective, dialogic processes that are collaboratively constructed and negotiated in and through interaction in various contexts. The role of stance and stance taking has been examined as local sequentiallyorganized phenomena in everyday and institutional interactions and in a larger sociolinguistic framework. The study of evaluation has similarly branched out to a discursive direction, adopting various methods that facilitate the analysis of evaluative practices in various discursive contexts. The body of work pertaining to this turn has facilitated a pivotal shift in understanding stance and evaluation as intersubjective rather than subjective phenomena, at the same time putting forward the notion that stance taking and evaluative practices take much more complex and multidimensional forms in face-to-face and mediated interpersonal communication than previously thought. Furthermore, this work has demonstrated the involvement of such practices in a great number of local and global linguistic and social processes to do with issues ranging, for example, from epistemic authority to social distribution of power.

This chapter presents a sociopragmatic approach to the study of affect and emotion, taking into account the fact that human emotions are conceptualized and linguistically expressed by means of speech acts within different and various affective practices. Key theories addressing the topic from a linguistic and discourse-pragmatic perspective are outlined and critically discussed, arguing for the need to broaden the scope of research towards a more complex, multidisciplinary and multidimensional analysis of emotion. Thus, the main findings of approaches such as those of functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, social and cultural theories, and sensory pragmatics are also outlined. The relationship between emotion and other discursive phenomena such as stance taking, (im)politeness, swearing, humor or irony is highlighted, as is the relationship between emotion and evaluation. Finally, an analysis of a videotaped narrative of personal experience is presented, emphasizing the importance of both deconstructing the different elements of discursive emotion and formulating appropriate research questions, in order to shed light on the crucial sociopragmatic aspects of affective relational practices.

In this chapter, I offer examples of ethnographic approaches to discourse, focusing in particular on how linguistic anthropologists have engaged with and expanded upon the concepts and theoretical tools offered by Goffman and Bakhtin. This includes attention to how Goffman unpacks interactional participant roles, how his concept of footing has been critical to recent interest in stance, and also how speakers linguistically shift in and out of registers. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse analysts have turned to explore the productive concepts of genre, intertextuality, voicing and chronotopes. Ethnographic discourse analysis connects levels of discourse and context and relies on specific methodological strategies to capture the dynamic ethnographic and sociopolitical contexts within which language is located and to which it contributes and responds.

This chapter opens by exploring how Trump’s self-aggrandizing political masculinization is connected to his racism. As Trump elaborates his identity as a White supremacist strongman, he implies that only he can emasculate brown maculinities through the tools of White ethnonationalism. Trump has also praised and admired despots across the world, preferring the trappings of cold-blooded brutality to the trope of the White civilizer. The chapter goes on to discuss how Latin American leaders have responded discursively to President Trump, as each adopts a particular stance to respond to his supremacist strongman masculinity. The stances of former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, for instance, precipitated anxiety about Trump’s political humiliation of Mexico and his gendered humiliation of Peña Nieto. The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has opted for a dignified posture, rebuking Trump while championing the revalorization of indigenity, rurality, and the Mexican common folk. Meanwhile, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, plainly admires and vociferously parrots Trump’s white ethnonationalism, echoing almost word for word the text of Trump’s campaign speeches. These Latin American leaders thus by turns vilify and emulate Trump’s posturing, whether to counter, contain, or amplify the unpredictable power of the elephantine neighbor to the North.

Trump’s personal relationships with Middle Eastern leaders have disrupted the long-standing bureaucracy and image of American public diplomacy, especially as new policies hinge on Trump’s tweets about his personal feelings. This chapter reads Trump’s positionality vis-à-vis Middle Eastern politics through the lens of stance-taking, which structures relationships, ideologies, and identities. One of the striking dimensions of Trump’s stances with respect to the Middle East is the way he indexes Arab and Muslim hierarchies. By aligning with rich Arab Gulf states and dis-aligning with the larger majority of Muslims and Arabs, Trump produces a cluster of simplified binary stances evaluating “good/rich” and “bad/poor” Arabs and Muslims. Saudi royalty are friendly billionaires; al-Sisi of Egypt and Netanyahu of Israel are his partners in fighting Islamic terrorism; and the rest of Arabs and Muslims represent either radical Islamic threats or uncivilized refugees. Trumpian speeches about “rich Arabs” buying American arms and goods and the total absence of “other Arabs” (ordinary people in non-wealthy, but also Arab countries) are consistent with his overall diplomatic and economic view of “America First,” which speaks largely to an internal American base and is not only unconcerned with other cultures, but also callous to refugees and immigrants.

This chapter uses a famous article on the communicative features of “bullshitting” (Frankfurt 2005) to shed fresh light on select statements by Donald Trump. Frankfurt’s central observation was that in bullshitting, unlike lying, the speaker isn’t deliberately aiming to deceive and cover up the truth; rather, he can’t be bothered to care about the truth conditions of a statement. While Trump has undoubtedly told countless willful lies, some of his utterances suggest instead a predominance of bullshit. This chapter investigates Trump’s bullshit from a communicative perspective, focusing on Trump’s stance in using bullshit (in particular his desire to produce a positive self-impression) and his use of Twitter as a medium that particularly encourages bullshit in its short character bursts. Bullshitting becomes another tool in Trump’s strategy of branded entertainment, used for self-aggrandizing and to boost his impression management, to create the Trump’ spectacle, and to test others’ loyalty.

This chapter examines the socialization of affective stances towards church practicesduring classroom interactions at a Russian heritage language Orthodox Christian school in Southern California. Based on analyses of audiovisual recordings and ethnographic observations of classroom interactions over a year and a half, the importance of showing proper feelings, attitudes, and emotions towards practices of Orthodoxy was found to be a central theme in the teachers’ discourse. The analysis pays attention to teachers’ use of words, prosody, and embodiment in cultivating students’ appropriate affective stances towards priests’ and servants’ dress and the use of incense. Although children usually express agreement and alignment with the expected positive stances, at times they challenge the proposed stances in various ways. The chapter contributes to our understanding of the significance and mechanics of the often implicit socialization process that takes place in mundane classroom interactions, involving co-construction and negotiation of stances along with positioning of parties vis-à-vis each other in discourse.

This chapter employs the language socialization approach to analyze the heteroglossic nature of linguistic practices and moral discourses in Sikh history classes at a US gurdwara (Sikh temple). Based on ethnographic audiovisual recordings, observations, and interviews carried out in a Sikh education program over a two-year period, analyses of classroom interactions during educational activities illuminate the semiotic repertoires that shape and reflect notions of ethno-religious identification in a minority community in transition and the multiple discourses tied to community survival. The analysis of classroom interactions reveals the collaborative and, at times, conflictual processes of coming to terms with forging a coherent model of Sikh community norms. The findings demonstrate how postcolonial concepts of modernity and transnational identity formation are reflected in youth experiences and language practices as they grapple with the contemporary sociopolitical landscape of the United States. The chapter provides a unique perspective on links between classroom discourse and diasporic community innovations.

In recent decades, identity has served a critical role in the study of World Englishes (WEs). At the core of this interest lies the idea that changing forms of identity construction may have played a crucial part among the groups involved in the development of New Englishes. However, not everyone agrees on the role identity may have played in the development of WEs. This chapter locates this research strand in recent theoretically based ideas about identity. It provides an overview of the different perspectives of identity within sociolinguistics and relates this to the study of WEs. It then outlines Third-Wave Variationist Sociolinguistics and some of its central issues pertaining to WEs, identity, and indexicality. Representative studies are considered that provide empirical evidence of identity performance and indexicality in a variety of local and global contexts. These concern, in particular, (1) the social meanings of features of English at the micro level of interaction, in which identity work is most transparent, and (2) the perception of linguistic features.

This chapter discusses the remaining four dimensions, which are less easily subsumed under a logic of either modality or conventions of a narrowly defined register. For each of these, explanations are provided that have to do with drifts in discourse conventions, cultural differences, and grammatical peculiarities across varieties of English.