Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-12T14:25:06.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cultural standing in expression of opinion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2004

CLAUDIA STRAUSS
CLAUDIA STRAUSS
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Pitzer College, 1050 N. Mills Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, claudia_strauss@pitzer.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage.I am grateful for helpful comments from Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society as well as Justin Beck, Paul Ireland, Ronald Macaulay, Naomi Quinn, Daniel Segal, James Van Cleve, other students in Methods of Discourse Analysis (spring 2001) and Language and Power (spring 2003), and other colleagues who commented on the paper when I presented it at Pitzer College in February 2000.

Keywords

Opinion displaydiscourse analysisargumentationhedgesmodalitywelfare discourse
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 161 - 194
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In Michael Holquist (ed.), The dialogic imagination, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Balaban, Victor (2000). The Virgin Mary, the apocalypse, and the Internet: A cognitive linguistic analysis of discourse at a Marian apparition site. Dissertation, Emory University.
Bernstein, Basil (1971). Class, codes and control: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. New York: Schocken.CrossRef
Besnier, Niko (1992). Reported speech and affect on Nukulaelae Atoll. In Jane H. Hill & Judith T. Irvine (eds.), Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse, 161–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (1982). Learning to say what you mean in a second language: A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied Linguistics 3:29–59.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz (1938). The mind of primitive man. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Boyce, Nell (2001). Ecstatic? Maybe. But not without risks. U.S. News & World Report, 5 February 2001: 16.
Brown, Gillian, & Yule, George (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brownstein, Andrew (2001). Race, reparations, and free expression. Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 March 2001:A48–A50.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace, & Nichols, Johanna (eds.) (1986). Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Channell, Joanna (1994). Vague language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chen, Rong (2001). Self-politeness: A proposal. Journal of Pragmatics 33:87–106.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, & Comaroff, John (1991). Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRef
D'Andrade, Roy G. (1987). A folk model of the mind. In Dorothy Holland & Naomi Quinn (eds.), Cultural models in language and thought, 112–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
D'Andrade, Roy G. (n.d.) Some methods for studying cultural cognitive structures. In N. Quinn (ed.), Finding culture: Methods for the cultural analysis of talk. To appear, New York: Palgrave.
D'Andrade, Roy G., & Strauss, Claudia (1992) (eds). Human motives and cultural models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duranti, Alessandro (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2000). Class ceiling. Independent, 5–11 January 2000:15–17. [First printed in In these Times.]
Fairclough, Norman (1989). Language and power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fairclough, Norman (2000). Discourse, social theory, and social research: The discourse of welfare reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4:163–95.Google Scholar
Garvey, Megan, & Rosenblatt, Robert A. (2001). Anthrax fears in a 911 call. Los Angeles Times, 8 November 2001: A1, A15.
Givón, Talmy (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Givón, Talmy (1982). Evidentiality and epistemic space. Studies in Language 6:23–49.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Pantheon.
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goffman, Erving (1981). Radio talk. In his Forms of talk, 197–330. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Grice, Paul (1981). Presupposition and conversational implicature. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 183–98. New York: Academic Press.
Halliday, Michael A. K. (1976). Modality and modulation in English. In Gunther R. Kress (ed.), Halliday: System and function in language, 189–213. London: Oxford University Press.
Hewitt, John P., & Stokes, Randall (1975). Disclaimers. American Sociological Review 40:1–11.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. (1995). The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative. In Dennis Tedlock & Bruce Mannheim (eds.), The dialogic emergence of culture, 97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hill, Jane H. (n.d.) Finding culture in narrative. In Naomi Quinn (ed.), Finding culture: Methods for the cultural analysis of talk. To appear, New York: Palgrave.
Hill, Jane H., & Zepeda, Ofelia (1992). Mrs. Patricio's trouble: The distribution of responsibility in an account of personal experience. In Jane H. Hill & Judith T. Irvine (eds.), Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse, 197–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobart, Mark (1975). Orators and patrons: Two types of political leader in Balinese village society. In Maurice Bloch (ed.), Political language and oratory in traditional society, 65–92. London: Academic Press.
Hodge, Robert, & Kress, Gunther (1988). Social semiotics. Cambridge: Polity.
Holland, Dorothy, & Quinn, Naomi (1987) (eds.). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchins, Edwin (1980). Culture and inference: A Trobriand case study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRef
Hyland, Ken (1998). Boosting, hedging and negotiation of academic knowledge. Text 13: 349–82.Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Karttunen, Lauri (n.d.). Presuppositional phenomena. Ms., Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin.
Keenan, Elinor (1975). A sliding sense of obligatoriness: The polystructure of Malagasy oratory. In Maurice Bloch (ed.), Political language and oratory in traditional society, 93–112. London: Academic Press.
Kerr, Bob (1993). The protesting poor deserve to be there. Providence Journal, 6 December 1993: E1–2.
Kluckhohn, Clyde (1941). Patterning as exemplified in Navaho culture. In Leslie Spier et al. (eds.), Language, culture, and personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir, 109–30. Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.
Kluckhohn, Clyde (1943). Covert culture and administration problems. American Anthropologist 45:213–27.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther, & Hodge, Robert (1979). Language as ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kubui, A. (1988). Aspects of hedgings in the discussion of medical English discourse. Dissertation, University of Aston in Birmingham.
Labov, T. (1980). The communication of morality: Cooperation and commitment in a food cooperative. Dissertation, Columbia University.
Labov, William, & Fanshel, David (1977). Therapeutic discourse: Psychotherapy as conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Lakoff, George (1972). Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. In Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 183–228. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, John (1977). Semantics, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Macaulay, Ronald (2002). You know, it depends. Journal of Pragmatics 34:749–67.Google Scholar
McIlvenny, Paul (1996). Popular public discourse at speakers' corner: Negotiating cultural identities in interaction. Discourse and Society 7:7–37.Google Scholar
Markkanen, Raija, & Schröder, Hartmut (1989). Hedging as a translation problem in scientific texts. In C. Laurén & M. Nordman (eds.), Special languages: From human thinking to thinking machines, 171–75. London: Multilingual Matters.
Markkanen, Raija (1997). Hedging: A challenge for pragmatics and discourse analysis. In Raija Markkanen & Hartmut Schröder (eds.), Hedging and discourse: Approaches to the analysis of a pragmatic phenomenon in academic texts, 3–18. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRef
Myers, Greg (1989). The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles. Applied Linguistics 10:1–35.Google Scholar
Myers, Greg (1998). Displaying opinions: Topics and disagreement in focus groups. Language in Society 27:85–111.Google Scholar
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth (1993). The spiral of silence: Public opinion – our social skin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Overstreet, Maryann, & Yule, George (2001). Formulaic disclaimers. Journal of Pragmatics 33:45–60.Google Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm, & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. John Wilkinson & Purcell Weaver, trans. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Plaxico, Ashley (1998). To find God, look no further than your own conscience. The Chronicle (Duke University), 22 October 1998: 10.
Pomerantz, Anita (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritages (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quinn, Naomi (n.d.). How to reconstruct the schemas people share, from what they say. In Naomi Quinn (ed.), Finding culture: Methods for the cultural analysis of talk. To appear, New York: Palgrave.
Ruddick, Lisa (2001). The near enemy of the humanities is professionalism. Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 November 2001: B7–9.
Sacks, Harvey (1987). On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In Graham Button & John Lee (eds.), Talk and social organization, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Salager-Meyer, Françoise; Defieves, Gérard; & Manelynck, Miguel (1996). Epistemic modality in 19th and 20th century medical English written discourse: A principal component analysis study. Interface 10:163–97.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.; Jefferson, Gail; & Sacks, Harvey (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53:361–82.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1985). Everyday argument: The organization of diversity in talk. In Teun van Dijk (ed.), Handbook of discourse analysis, vol. 3, 35–46. London: Academic Press.
Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Sherzer, Joel (1989). Namakke, Sunmakke, Kormakke: Three types of Cuna speech event. In Richard Bauman & Joel Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, 263–82. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Simpson, Paul (1993). Language, ideology and point of view. London: Routledge.CrossRef
Skelton, George (2001). A clear voice cuts through all the energy crisis static. Los Angeles Times, 8 February 2001: A3.
Skelton, John (1988). The care and maintenance of hedges. English Language Teaching Journal 42:37–43.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, & Wilson, Dierdre (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Stalnaker, Robert C. (1978). Assertion. In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Strathern, Andrew (1975). Veiled speech in Mount Hagen. In Maurice Bloch (ed.), Political language and oratory in traditional society, 185–203. London: Academic Press.
Strauss, Claudia (2000). The culture concept and the individualism/collectivism debate: Dominant and alternative attributions for class in the United States. In Larry Nucci et al. (eds.), Culture, thought, and development, 85–114. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Strauss, Claudia (n.d.). Analyzing discourse for cultural complexity. In Naomi Quinn (ed.), Finding culture. To appear, New York: Palgrave.
Strauss, Claudia, & Quinn, Naomi (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stubbs, Michael (1983). Discourse analysis: The sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stubbs, Michael (1996). Text and corpus analysis: Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tree, Jean E. Fox, & Schrock, Josef C. (2002). Basic meanings of you know and I mean. Journal of Pragmatics 34:727–47.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. van (1987). Communicating racism: Ethnic prejudice in thought and talk. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
van Dijk, Teun A. van (1998). Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Allan Bell & Peter Garrett (eds.), Approaches to media discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse. Discourse Studies 4:225–52.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and literature. London: Oxford University Press.
Yamada, Haru (1997). Different games, different rules: Why Americans and Japanese misunderstand each other. New York: Oxford University Press.