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An examination of various discourse genres, showing how choices among linguistic resources are mediated by self-expressive choices. Linguistic consistency across various situations is discussed with the question of how, if language is fundamentally idiosyncratic, people can understand one another

Labov and Waletzky's (1997[1967]) path-breaking description of "narrative syntax" arose in the context of variationist sociolinguistic research, and narrative continues to be an important source of data for variationist' work. In most of this work, however, narrative is not the object of study. Variationist sociolinguists are interested in the structure and function of sounds, words, and phrases found in narrative data, but they have not typically asked how the structure and function of narrative itself might bear on the questions about linguistic variation and language change that define their field. Here I suggest that close attention to the structure and function of narrative can, in fact, shed light on a topic of central interest to variationists, namely vernacular norm-formation. I argue that narratives about encounters with linguistic difference help create shared orientations to particular sets of nonstandard linguistic features and link them with region, class, and other sources of identity. I further suggest that narrative functions particularly well as a vehicle for language-ideological differentiation (Gal & Irvine, 1995) of this sort.

▪ Abstract  This article presents arguments for supplementing linguistic work focused on abstract social systems (languages, dialects, varieties) with linguistic work focused on individual speakers. It begins by reviewing how the individual speaker has been conceived of (when at all) in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Two areas of linguistic research, discourse processing and linguistic variation and change, serve as examples of what is to be gained by supplementing a linguistics of systems with a linguistics of speakers. Finally, interest in the individual voice is placed in the context of a larger shift toward a more phenomenological approach to language and greater particularity in methods for its study.

Linguistics at Work:. Reader of Applications. Dallin D. Oaks. ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1998. 758 pp.