Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall — Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach

43 published claims from this book.

• Adequation can be applied by speakers to position others as alike for political ends.
• Adjectives and predication can reorient racial labels into negotiated identity categories
• Agency can be habitual, deliberate, or distributed across several co-acting social actors.
• Agency is best theorized as accomplished social action, not individual autonomy.
• Agency is better understood as accomplished social action than as individual autonomous intent.
• All representations of culture are necessarily partial accounts
• Distinction suppresses similarities just as adequation suppresses differences
• Emergent identity work still draws on structure built up in prior interactions
• Hegemony lets ideologies operate without any locatable authority.
• Identity alignment requires perceived sufficiency of similarity rather than actual sameness
• Identity analyses should combine multiple dimensions rather than foreground one
• Identity can be denaturalized to reveal its crafted and contingent nature.
• Identity claims gain authenticity by tracing a chain back to a venerated past.
• Identity emerges in discourse rather than preceding it
• Identity is constituted by context and asserted only as a partial account.
• Identity is constituted through social action and language rather than merely reflected in behavior
• Identity is constructed jointly by several indexical levels rather than one
• Identity ranges across macro demographic categories, local cultural positions, and fleeting interactional stances.
• Identity relations involve more than a single sameness-difference axis.
• Identity similarity is interactionally achieved, not a matter of actual sameness.
• Identity theories lag behind the linguistic research that has made identity central.
• Indexical tie creation is inherently ideological and builds bottom-up group norms.
• Indexicality links linguistic forms to identity through culturally rooted ideologies
• Institutional power structures both bestow and strip recognition of identities.
• Language-identity links are ideological, not natural
• Linguistic identity is built from repeated micro-style choices rather than any essence.
• Local identity categories often explain linguistic practice better than analysts’ broad sociological categories.
• Macro social categories poorly capture the identity relations that matter locally
• Narrators authenticate stories by tracing provenience to a venerated past.
• No single method can capture all of identity’s complexity
• Non-speakers deploy AAVE features tactically to critique whiteness and build alliance.
• One utterance can simultaneously produce adequation and distinction
• Performance and culture emerge during interaction rather than preexisting it
• Performance can unmask identity as something performed, not essential.
• Playful performance can denaturalize links between phenotype and ethnic identity.
• Political rhetoric can manufacture group associations purely through sufficiency of similarity
• Presupposition in courtroom talk can assign victim or perpetrator identity to a speaker
• Repeated stances in interaction accrue into enduring identities like gender
• Same linguistic form can index identity at nested scales
• Sociocultural linguistics unites several disciplines studying language, culture, and society
• Static categories only partly explain identity positioning
• Structure and agency interpenetrate through every discursive exchange.
• The social linguistic notion of distinction generalizes Bourdieu’s class-based concept to all differentiation.