A Sociocultural Approach to Style

Abstract

Common definitions of style have tended to treat it as an artifact controlled by the producer, overlooking two features afforded attention in sociocultural linguistics: dynamism and co-construction. Although some scholars have highlighted style’s interactivity, their accounts have not yielded a comprehensive theory. This essay advances and illustrates a more rigorous definition of style as a fluid activity in which meaning is often contested, continually negotiated, and necessarily informed by interlocutors’ beliefs. Ultimately, in integrating and expanding on theories of style’s interactivity and contingency, it provides guidance for style researchers and demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary conversation around style.

Notes

1. ¹My thanks to RR reviewers T. R. Johnson and Star Medzerian Vanguri; to Jonathan Lippman, Brian Ray, and Joe Turner; to my dissertation committee, Paul Prior, Gail Hawisher, Michele Koven, and Peter Mortensen; and to my participants, Debojoy Chanda and Bob Markley.

2. ²Although some differentiate style and voice, I use them to name the same phenomenon. I explain this in the next section.

3. ³Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall coin “sociocultural linguistics” to “highlight an interdisciplinary coalition that is already thriving but not always recognized” (404). They describe how different approaches to the study of language, culture, and society, including variationist sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis, share certain common theories, methods, themes, and political commitments. Researchers united these fields under sociolinguistics in the 1960s and 70s, thinking them “complementary rather than competing.” But by the mid 1980s, US sociolinguistics had become “a quantitative approach to language and society,” and ethnographic work was understood to occur mostly under linguistic anthropology (Bucholtz and Hall 402).

4. ⁴I follow Paul Prior, who rejects the binary view of voice as either personal or social and argues that voice be seen as both “because discourse is understood as fundamentally historical, situated, and indexical” (“Voices” 55).

5. ⁵Linguistic anthropologist Asif Agha sees a place for style and voice but favors register, whereas linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine and sociolinguist Penelope Eckert (“Three”) prefer style.

6. ⁶All parties requested that their real names be used.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea R. Olinger

Andrea R. Olinger is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville. Her work has appeared in Research in the Teaching of English, Linguistics and Education, Writing & Pedagogy, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.