Words become one’s own only through intentional appropriation and accenting

Evidence

See Bakhtin’s analysis of the dialogic quality of language—what he calls a double-voiced discourse. Bakhtin observes: “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his [or her] own accent, when he [or she] appropriates the word, adapting it to his [or her] own semantic and expressive intention.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1544

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse — appropriation and accenting — is the linguistic theory underwriting respectability as a re-signified term.
• XREF: Links to ch3’s model of the black church as dialogic heteroglossia from this same book. — connects to: Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1487; Intertextuality requires prior linguistic autonomy rather than fusion — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 620; Word meanings are social facts no individual user can unilaterally change. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1471 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position #corroborates (0.82) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1487
• Intertextuality requires prior linguistic autonomy rather than fusion #expands (0.78) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 620