This case study explores the metapragmatic awareness of a young, academically successful, African American, female speaker. It describes some of the identities and orientations that the speaker performs through language and the perceived role of linguistic style in such performances. This study suggests that these linguistic performances are a complex negotiation of ethnicity, gender and class that both draw from and resist the macrosocial indexing of social categories. Further, the understood role of language in the social negotiations of the speaker serves as an illustration of the relationship among metapragmatics, ideology and identity and also highlights the dynamism of identity management as individuals position themselves in allegiance with, or opposition to, various groups that populate their social landscape.

No abstract

No abstract

In this study, we explore linguistic constructions of gender in US sports reportage concerning two related basketball altercations: the Pacers–Pistons NBA fight in 2004 and the Shock–Sparks WNBA fight in 2008. We use a combined corpus and qualitative textual analysis to investigate coverage from the days immediately following the fights and to compare that coverage to sports reportage more generally. Our analysis reveals key differences in narrative focus; for example, that NBA coverage is most interested in blame assignation in the isolated event, while WNBA coverage concerns gender and the league writ large. Such patterns, which are realised linguistically in both explicit and implicit ways, contribute to the ‘othering’ of women and women athletes in the increasingly important sports-media-commercial complex.

This paper explores stylized renderings of Singapore English as such 'verbal art' is used by Singaporean youth in popular online forums. In order to analyze these stylizations, this study uses corpora collected from two forums frequented by Singaporean students. The data suggests that posters often use stylized representations to perform or to ventriloquize the identity of an Ah Beng (a kind of hustler or gangster). Implicated in such performances are sometimes complex negotiations of class, gender, and ethnicity. The relationship among the linguistic features central to our study and the social meanings signaled by those features suggest the value of approaches that emphasize the range of pragmatic and metapragmatic meanings or indexicalities that accrue to features in modeling variation in Singapore English.