Enregisterment

As described in Chapter 1, Agha (2007) defines “enregisterment” as the process through which signs come reliably to signal certain social types, for some group of speakers, over time. Enregisterment is analogous to the process of entextu-alization in many ways, except that it occurs across events. As an example of enregisterment, Agha (2007) describes how the association between the phonological regularities described as British “Received Pronunciation” and a speaker of Standard English did not exist at the beginning of the 19th century but was well established a century later. He shows how the change occurred through a linked series of speech events in which the hearer in one event circulated a sign or model when speaking in a subsequent event. Hearing someone associate a phonological regularity from Received Pronunciation with educated, refined character, a hearer might presuppose the same association in subsequent speech. As more hearers and speakers did this, the sign—identity linkage circulated more widely. Agha describes how readers of prescriptivist works that specified “correct” pronunciation in 19th-century Britain sometimes wrote novels that circulated Received Pronunciation more widely as an index of refined social identity. Over time, as links between pronunciation and models of personhood traveled across branching pathways, more people recognized and accepted the association between these phonological forms and personal characteristics like “educated” and “refined.”

Enregisterment involves the creation of links across pathways of events, through which a larger social process occurs—like the establishment of a social type (refined, educated Britons) and the linguistic signs that index it (the phonological regularities of Received Pronunciation). For smaller-scale cross-event processes, too—like the emergence of a social identity for someone like Tyisha across weeks or months in classroom discourse—the appropriate metapragmatic model for understanding the student’s identity may not solidify in one speech event or one class session. Instead, as illustrated in Chapter 1, it may take several linked events for an identity to emerge, and that identity might subsequently shift across a pathway of subsequent events. Discourse analysis across speech events traces the linked events across which enregisterment occurs.

As described in Chapter 1, the solidification of cross-event pathways is similar in many respects to within-event entextualization, the gelling of indexical signs and metapragmatic models that buttress each other within an event. Early in a pathway, like Tyisha’s pathway through the classroom discussions across that academic year, the nature of an emerging identity might be ambiguous. More than one model might conceivably describe the focal person’s identity or the ongoing type of social action occurring. Just the discussion of Tyisha the courageous liar, taken by itself, could have merely involved teachers and students teasing Tyisha, or it could have been an aberration. Across events, however, as teachers and students continued to talk with and about Tyisha, a clearer identity emerged for her. The subsequent discussion of Tyisha the beast reinforced Tyisha’s status as an outcast, as someone different from the other students who was likely to disrupt classroom activities and did not follow mainstream social norms. The pathway became more rigid, as it were, and later events were increasingly constrained by the mutually reinforcing models of identity that had been applied to her in earlier events.

Pathways become more rigid in this way as a set of mutually presupposing indexicals emerges across events. Within an event, the cycle of iterative partwhole interpretation comes to an end when a set of indexicals and the metapragmatic models they make salient come to buttress each other, as a configuration of indexical signs is established and presupposes relevant context that supports consistent inferences about the types of social action occurring. Across events, something similar happens. Indexicals across several events come to presuppose each other and come to presuppose certain models of social identity and social action, thus making the pathway more rigid and the metapragmatic model more easily presupposable across events.

Discourse analysts must do three things to trace cross-event pathways, in addition to analyzing contextualization and entextualization within discrete events. First, we must identify linked events that make up a pathway. We do this by describing how quotation, parallelism across events, and other devices establish linkages and thus create cross-event context—linked events across a pathway that become a special kind of context crucial to enregisterment. In the case of Tyisha from Chapter 1, for example, Figures 1.5 and 1.6 represent the parallel narrated voices, narrating positions, and narrating evaluations across the events of Tyisha the courageous liar and Tyisha the beast. The robust parallels across both narrated and narrating events on these two days indicate that the events are linked as part of a pathway. They form cross-event context for each other, context that is crucial to interpreting the emergence of Tyisha’s social identity across these and other events in the pathway.

Second, we must delineate cross-event configurations of signs, describing how indexical signs from more than one event come to presuppose each other and create relevant context for interpreting both individual events and pathways across them. In Chapter 1, for example, we described various signs that helped characterize Tyisha as an immoral, disruptive outcast. In the discussion of Tyisha the courageous liar, the expressions “lie to her face,’’ “lying in another person mother face,’’ and “tell her this big bold-faced lie” accumulate to voice Tyisha as unethical. In the discussion of Tyisha the beast that occurred a week later, “play Nintendo” and “go to sleep, get up and eat” presuppose a related voice of someone wasting her life and refusing to participate in socially valued pursuits. In the courageous liar discussion, the teacher implies that Tyisha is not cooperating with others in the narrating event to move the conversation forward, saying “I know you never bought into it, but the rest of us seem to be using this as a definition.” In the beast discussion, the teacher says, “you throw out seventeen things and then nobody can even begin to address any of these things.” These claims presuppose similar models of Tyisha’s disruptive behavior in the classroom itself, and they thus form cross-event configurations that hold these events together and collectively presuppose a narrated voice (immoral and beast-like), a narrating position (outcast from the core group of teachers and students), and a consistent type of social action (exclusion) across the pathway.

Third, we must trace the shape of pathways, showing how they become rigid and thereby accomplish processes like socialization and learning. This requires inference from cross-event configurations, in which participants and analysts construe a cross-event process like the social identification of Tyisha. As sketched in Chapter 1 and described in detail by Wortham (2006), Tyisha becomes a disruptive outcast across several classroom conversations from December through February. Her pathway shifts from the direction it was going earlier in the academic year. She stops being another good student and becomes identified as disruptive. Later in the spring, her identity changes again, as she becomes a reasoned dissenter instead of a disruptive outcast.

We illustrate these three components of discourse analysis across speech events briefly here, with more data from the Asian American supplementary school classroom and short examples from more widely circulating media discourse. Table 2.3 describes the steps in discourse analysis beyond the speech event. The next four chapters illustrate our approach in more detail.