View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SHAREOK repository DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS By Elena Anatolyevna Rodgers Bachelor of Arts in Philology/Teaching English and Russian as Foreign Languages Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University Blagoveshchensk, Russia 1998 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2017 DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS Dissertation Approved: Dennis Preston Dissertation Adviser Ron Brooks Nancy Caplow Shelia Kennison . ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to first express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dennis Preston, whose mentorship and inspiration has been crucial to my work on this dissertation. Thank you for your unwavering support and encouragement, for the knowledge and insight you shared, and for the honor of collaborating with you on several conference presentations. This allowed me to grow as a scholar, and gave me confidence and motivation to complete this dissertation. Thank you also for the financial assistance with conference-related expenses. I am very grateful to you and Carol Preston for your kindness and warm hospitality. Also, big thanks to my committee members - Ron Brooks, Nancy Caplow, and Shelia Kennison, whose encouragement and helpful feedback are very much appreciated. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the late Ravi Sheorey for his invaluable help, guidance and support in the early years of my doctoral studies. This dissertation would not have been possible without the knowledge and academic abilities that I have developed in the stimulating intellectual environment created by wonderful OSU professors whose classes I was fortunate to take. For that, I am very thankful to Rebecca Damron, Gene Halleck, Carol Moder, and An Cheng. I am also grateful to the many faculty members of the Department of Foreign Languages at the Pedagogical University in Blagoveshchensk, Russia, whose classes gave me a solid foundation in language studies. Many thanks to my interviewees whose help with data collection was very important for the progress and successful completion of this dissertation. Thank you for your time and willingness to be a part of this study. I am also grateful to the members of the FOOLs meetings at OSU for the valuable feedback and thought-provoking discussions. Last but not least, I thank my friends and family for their support and love that has sustained me throughout the years of my graduate studies. iii Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee members or Oklahoma State University. Name: ELENA ANATOLYEVNA RODGERS Date of Degree: MAY, 2017 Title of Study: DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS Major Field: ENGLISH, SPECIALIZATION IN LINGUISTICS Abstract: This study offers a new approach to language attitudes and ideologies which applies argumentation theory in a discourse-based analysis of the processes of sociolinguistic indexicality. This method is presented in the context of the previously-used discourse- based approaches to language attitudes which are reviewed here in terms of their contributions to the understanding of the creation of socio-indexical meanings in discourse. The review proposes a five-level typology which includes topic-oriented, linguistic, cognitive, interactional, and rhetorical levels of analysis. This study explores the potential of the New Rhetoric theory developed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) to serve as an overarching framework which can help cohere multidisciplinary perspectives on language use and social relations in the analysis of folk- linguistic discourse. This approach allows for an analysis of the rhetorical connectedness of discursive acts that contribute to semiotic construals of folk-linguistic beliefs at different levels of discourse organization. This dissertation proposes that a sociolinguistic study may use as a starting point of analysis a specific locally-salient folk-concept and shows that this type of analytic focus may be productive in exploring the metapragmatic functioning of folk-concepts in the context-specific activations of the fluid fields of sociolinguistic indexical relations. As a result of applying the proposed rhetorically-oriented method, this study provides new perspectives on how language users argumentatively construct conceptual associations between language-related and social representations in everyday discourse. It discusses the ways in which propositional processes of sociolinguistic indexicality engage experiential, affective, performative, perceptual, and identity-related processes: participants demonstrate these interrelated engagements in everyday metalinguistic discourse when they rationalize, justify, valorize, and illustrate their individual experiences with linguistic variability. The metapragmatic aspects of such constructions include discursive processes of objectivation, essentialization, and reification of sociolinguistic distinctiveness, as well as constructions of the clustering of linguistic and social typifications that create indexical profiles of speaking styles and index symbolic boundaries between social groups. These processes reveal how speakers appropriate the meaning potential of linguistic variables and conceptualize it in discursive constructions of linguistic distinctiveness. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Opening Remarks ..................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Organization ............................................................................................................. 2 1.3 Sociolinguistic Variation as a Social-Semiotic System .............................................. 2 1.4 Folk-linguistic Concept as a Starting Point of Analysis in Sociolinguistic Inquiry ..... 4 1.5 Folk-linguistic Discourse as a Metasemiotic Activity ................................................ 8 II. REVIEW OF LITERATURE ......................................................................................... 16 2.1 Organizational Overview ........................................................................................ 16 2.2 Language Attitudes and Ideologies in Quantitative and Qualitative Paradigms......... 17 2.3 The Question of Definition: “Language Attitudes,” “Language Ideologies,” and “Language Regard” ............................................................................................... 19 2.4 Towards a Typology of Discourse-based Approaches to Language Attitudes: A Ra- tionale .................................................................................................................... 22 2.5 Topic-oriented Analysis .......................................................................................... 25 2.6 Linguistically-oriented Analysis .............................................................................. 30 2.7 Cognitively-oriented Analysis ................................................................................. 33 2.8 Interactional Analysis ............................................................................................. 37 2.9 Rhetorical Analysis ................................................................................................. 39 2.10 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................. 41 III. THE NEW RHETORIC APPROACH AS A DISCOURSE-BASED METHOD OF STU- DYING PROPOSITIONAL PROCESSES OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC INDEXICALITY 43 3.1 Organizational Overview ........................................................................................ 43 3.2 The New Rhetoric Approach to Argumentation ....................................................... 44 3.3 The Application of the New Rhetoric in this Dissertation ........................................ 47 3.4 The Role of the Audience in Argumentation: The Perelmanian Construct of The Audience ................................................................................................................. 49 3.5 Audience Agreement............................................................................................... 53 3.6 Objects of Agreement……………………………………………………………….. 54 3.6.1 Objects of Agreement: “Facts” ....................................................................... 55 3.6.2 Objects of Agreement: “Truths” ..................................................................... 60 3.6.3 Objects of Agreement: Presumptions of the Normal ....................................... 64 3.6.4 Objects of Agreement: Presumptions of the Normative .................................. 74 v Chapter Page 3.6.5 Objects of Agreement: Values ...................................................................... 77 3.6.6 Objects of Agreement: Concluding Remarks ................................................ 90 3.7 Techniques of Argumentation ................................................................................. 91 3.7.1 Techniques of Association ............................................................................ 92 3.7.2 Techniques of Dissociation ..........................................................................