Chapter 13—Language and Institutional Encounters

Chapter Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter students should be able to:
1. Explain the social and political factors that affect language standardization.
2. Describe how Received Pronunciation came to be the standard variety in Great Britain.
3. Explain how Indonesian came to be the dominant language of Indonesia.
4. Describe how literacy can be connected to language ideology, as illustrated by the
experience of the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea.
5. Discuss how speakers can quote authoritative sources to lend legitimacy to their
statements.
6. Describe the ways social status affects language and language use.
7. Describe the features of “powerless” speech as described by Erickson et al. (1978).
8. Compare and contrast the way Japanese speakers and American speakers use “powerful”
and “powerless” language.
9. Describe the way the Native American children in Philips’ (1978) study interacted in a
typical American classroom setting.
10. Explain chaining and arching as linguistic control devices in classrooms.
11. Describe how gender roles are reinforced through discourse in the classroom.
12. Describe how school authorities use language to induce others to agree with them.
13. Describe ways that patients can assert themselves in medical encounters.
14. Describe the problems that patients face when they do not speak the same language as
their doctor.
15. Identify the characteristics of legalese.
16. Contrast powerless speech with powerful speech and discuss the effects that the two
types of speech can have on a jury.
17. Identify the types of questions that can be used with witnesses and describe how they can
be used to maintain the power imbalance in legal encounters.
18. Describe how the social or economic class of a defendant can influence the way they are
treated in the courtroom.

Chapter Outline
Language ideology entail practices that select a standard language for use in public contexts like schools
and politics. Other varieties or dialects are then evaluated negatively in relation to the standard, and their
speakers are stigmatized.

Received Pronunciation- standard dialect in Great Britain used on the basis of class.

-The development of a standard language often coincides with processes of state formation and
centralization.
Afro-Lingua- dialect of Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in Great Britain. English words are
altered by changing syllables to highlight cultural and political meanings. (politics is not politricks and
system becomes shitstem) Originals words were linguistic stigmatization??

Bambi Schieffelin- studied the introduction of literacy among the Kaluli of Papua New Guniea.
Missionaries taught reading and writing and forced European beliefs.

Richard Parmentier- demonstrated the ways in which language use signaled changing norms associated
chiefly with language. High-ranked chiefs had little need to persuade others of their views through public
oratory, since their final decision is not up to debate.

-Differences in rights and values given to various categories of people are manifested in several features
of language: 1. The ability to name and classify. 2. Institutional contexts??

In our society, Institutional Settings, wherein roles are distributed, and interactions are managed in terms
of preassigned rights and constraints, are important in orienting, explaining, and influencing our lives. For
example, institutions that provide health care and education and legal institutions..

-Structure of setting, not inherent interest, affects people’s responses (Native American children ask
questions in one-on-one teacher settings not classroom settings)

Mishler- identified 2 types of “interrogative units,” each composed of a sequence of three utterances
including a question, a response from the addressee, and a confirmation from the initiator. Adults employ
2 methods of control: When initiating a discourse series, they use chaining to regain control after a child’s
response; when children initiate a series, adults use arching to make a countermove, taking control from
the child.

Chaining- asking another question after the child’s response

Arching- the child responding to the adult’s question with a question

Mehan- child being placed in special education by school board team. Psychologist speaks in jargon
language and does not explain in simple terms. Interrupts teacher and mother, but no one questions the
psychologist.

-Doctors also influence by providing or withholding information requested by patients in the middle of
making a decision about medical care.

-English speaking doctors with Spanish speaking patients require interpreters. When translating patient’s
words, the translators acted as pre-diagnosticians. So, some of the patients’ questions weren’t translated
so they were never answered.

Legal Settings- most highly structured interactional events in our culture. Each type of participant has a
different speaking style. Language used in legal proceedings maintains its prestige because of its
dissimilarities with colloquial English, so lawyers then become interpreters for clients.

Legalese- the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand.
Powerless Speech- used by low-status witnesses, is characterized by frequent use of intensifiers (so,
very), hedges (kinda, I think, I guess), hesitations forms (uh, well, ya know), questioning forms (rising
information in declarative contexts), polite forms (please, thank you). Bonnie Erickson discovered this
and powerful speech.

Powerful Speech- used by high-status witnesses (parole officers, doctors, and other expert professionals),
tends to be free of these markers ^^^ and to result in a more “straightforward manner.”

Technocracy- Technocracy is an ideological system of governance in which decision-makers are selected

on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or
technical knowledge.

-The industrial revolution created classes.

Sandra Harris- found that magistrates’ proceedings involve defendants, usually of low socioeconomic
status, who are in court because they failed to pay previously imposed fines. The goal of magistrates is to
question defendants, ascertain reasons for noncompliance, and impose a court-ordered schedule of
payments. Magistrates’ and clerk’s questions fall into several categories based on syntactic form:
Interrogatives (polar interrogatives: do you work?, Disjunctive interrogatives: are you married or single?,
Declaratives + Interrogative Frame: Is it true that…?, Interrogative request: Will you stand up, Mr. B.,
please?),

Wh-interrogatives (How much do they earn per week? Where are your children?),

Declaratives calling for Confirmation (You’re unemployed. -Yeah)

John Conley and William O’Barr- identified two different styles of presentation that they call “rule-
oriented” and “relational-oriented.”

Rule-Oriented- these accounts base their claims on “violations of specific rules, duties, and obligations,
such as those inscribed in contracts. In such accounts, litigants state the relevant facts in chronological
order and explicate specific cause-and-effect sequences. These are taken more seriously.

Relational-Oriented- these accounts “base their entitlement to relief on general rules of social conduct.
These narratives stress people’s social obligations and rights to fair treatment.

Expert Witness- ordinary people who can assert their rights to be heard if they feel that they have
legitimate knowledge and expertise. (Ex: old native American Pauitese man)

Technical Terms: arching, chaining, language ideologies, legalese, powerful speech, powerless
speech
Other Readings:
Language Ideologies and Status
Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the
Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2011. English with an Accent: Language, ideology and Discrimination in
the United States. New York: Routledge.
Kroskrity, Paul (Ed.). 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe:
SAR Press.
Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn Woolard and Paul Kroskrity (Eds.). 1998. Language Ideologies:
Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Institutional Encounters
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen and Beverly Hartford. 1993. Learning the rules of academic talk: A
longitudinal study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15, no. 4, pp. 279-304.

Conley, John and William O’Barr. 1998. Just Words: Law, Language, and Power, 2nd ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lane, Chris. 1993. Yes, I don’t understand: Yes, no, and European-Polynesian
miscommunication in New Zealand. Journal of Pragmatics 20: 163-188.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2011. English with an Accent: Language, ideology and Discrimination in
the United States. New York: Routledge.
Murphy, Beth and Joyce Neu. 1996. My grade’s too low: The speech act of complaining. In
Speech Acts Across Cultures: Challenged to Communication in a Second Language, ed. S. Gass
and J. Neu. New York: de Gruyter.
Phillips, Susan. 1972. Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs
children in community and classroom. In Functions of Language in the Classroom, ed. C.
Cadzen, V. John, and D. Hymes. New York: Teachers College Press.