Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture

Viola Wiegand, Michaela Mahlberg

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110487114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture demonstrates the potential of corpus linguistic methods for investigating language patterns across a range of contexts. Organised in three sections, the chapters range from detailed case studies on lexico-grammatical patterns to fundamental discussions of meaning as part of the 'discourse, contexts and cultures' theme. The final part on 'learner contexts' specifically emphasises the need for mixed-method approaches and the consideration of pedagogical implications for real world contexts.

Beyond its contribution to current debates in the field, this edited volume indicates new directions in cross-disciplinary work.

Part I:Discourse contexts and cultures

Beatrix Busse

Patterns of discursive urban place-making in Brooklyn, New York

Beatrix Busse, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, [email protected]

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to conceptualise urban linguistic and semiotic patterns from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on the example of multi-modal discursive practices used in selected neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, New York, this paper shows how spaces are turned into meaningful places through various social semiotic moves and stylistic practices. These discursive processes of urban “place-making” (cf. Busse & Warnke 2015) create, construe and contest this specific urban Brooklynite place and identity and therewith mark – due to its speakers’ active role in positioning themselves in the social landscape (Silverstein 2003; Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson 2006; Searle 1995) – the value of particular Brooklynite neighbourhoods. The paper chooses a mixed-methods approach which combines both a qualitative and a quantitative methodological framework as well as approaches from sociolinguistics, corpus linguistic methodologies as well as semiotic landscape studies.

1Introduction

Figure 1 displays a tag that was photographed during my fieldwork trip to Brooklyn, New York, in May 2017. With rather unexciting fonts and a partially nonstandard orthography it relays the sentence “Spread love, its the Brooklyn way”. Figure 2, also photographed on the same trip, is a photo from a mural of the semiotic landscape on N 8th St. and Bedford Avenue in the neighbourhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It shows the same sentence but in a different artistic design. Despite the fact that both examples are different manifestations of that sentence, in each case, “Spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way” represents a patterned repetition of a linguistic strategy in the urban place of Brooklyn. This strategy is of value to and meaningful for both the producer and the viewer.

Fig. 1: Sign “Spread love, its the Brooklyn way”, Franklin Street ©Beatrix Busse.

Fig. 2: “Spread love it’s the Brooklyn way”, N 8th St. and Bedford Avenue, ©Beatrix Busse.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualise urban linguistic and semiotic patterns from an interdisciplinary perspective and within both a qualitative and a quantitative methodological framework. I shall use the communicative complexities and semiotic patterns of the city, and specifically of the borough of Brooklyn, New York, as a testbed for this notion of patterns.

Drawing on Busse and Warnke’s (2015) urbanity model, I propose that the emerging semiotic patterns of Brooklyn, such as “Spread love it’s the Brooklyn way”, act and are perceived as what I will call processes of “discursive urban place-making”. These are linguistic and semiotic practices which turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’ and make it meaningful for its inhabitants (cf. Cresswell 2004, 2006). Brooklyn is one of the largest, socially as well as ethnically most heterogeneous boroughs of the City of New York. Gentrification in Brooklyn has been particularly rapid in those neighbourhoods which, despite their geographical separation through the East River, are facing or are close(r) to Manhattan. My focus is therefore on exactly those now-gentrified neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, such as Williamsburg, Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. I will show that various social semiotic moves and stylistic practices create, construe and contest this specific urban Brooklynite place and identity and therewith mark – due to its speakers’ active role in positioning themselves in the social landscape (Silverstein 2003; Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson 2006; Searle 1995) – the value of particular Brooklynite neighbourhoods. In other words, these patterned discursive strategies are place-making: They reflect and construe, (re-)define and (re-)evaluate Brooklyn and its gentrified neighbourhoods as a brand, “Brooklyn©”, that is, a place with a particular character and style that has global impact on how other cities around the world perceive and create themselves.

Strongly linked to my notion of discursive urban place-making (through the use of linguistic patterns) is that of ‘enregisterment’ (Agha 2003, 2005; Johnstone 2009) which is the process by which linguistic features are ascribed with social values. In this paper, I will show that there is a need

1. to combine enregisterment with the concept of discursive urban place making,
2. to extend Johnstone’s (2009) approach to enregisterment as pattern-based to all levels of language, not just to (local) dialect features or metapragmatic practices,
3. to demonstrate that enregisterment can actually be measured quantitatively with the help of corpus linguistic methodology and, at the same time, has pointedly singular qualities that interplay with its measurable features, and
4. that patterned generic reference to Brooklyn as a whole and in comparison with Manhattan mark strategies of discursive urban place-making which create Brooklyn© as a brand.

On the one hand, this study establishes norms and enregistered linguistic and semiotic patterned practices of discursive urban place-making. On the other hand, it is also situated in what Eckert (2012) calls the ‘third wave’ of variationist study and what Pennycook and Otsuji (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010: 246; Penny-cook & Otsuji 2015) refer to as ‘metrolingual’ practices: the inclusion of singular contextual linguistic and semiotic artefacts which act as or move towards becoming place-making forces because they adhere to already established patterns, deviate from them or function as emerging triggers of place-making in the sense of “indexical mutability” (Eckert 2012: 94) and functional semiotic styling.

My study also supports Britain’s (2017) criticism of the sociolinguistic “gaze” as being circular because, he argues, sociolinguistic analyses have been too much focused on linguistic elites. This bias, according to Britain (2017), coincides with the ideological view that the British English standard or norm pronunciation is “Received Pronunciation” spoken by exactly that elite. What I shall present in this paper is also a theoretical and methodological redirection and shift of the “urban sociolinguistic gaze” towards both urban linguistic singularity as well as plurality and variation which are complexly and heterogeneously embedded in pattern-like strategies of urban discursive place-making (see also Busse 2018) and can be made visible on different levels of analysis as well as in different types of linguistic and multimodal data. Hence, I propose an innovative methodology which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to assess patterned discursive urban place-making and enregisterment processes and to show that these can indeed be measured. This methodology is the first to combine (i) variationist sociolinguistic approaches with (ii) (standard) corpus linguistic methodology, and (iii) semiotic landscape studies. I therefore include a variety of data collected in 2012 and ranging from a corpus of semi-structured interviews conducted with Brooklynites to literary texts and examples from the semiotic landscape of Brooklyn neighbourhoods. With the help of these data, I will address the following research questions:

1. What are the contemporary changing and stable linguistic and semiotic patterns that reflect Brooklyn ‘as a place’ in everyday contexts and that define and evaluate (i.e. enregister) – urban place in Brooklyn?
2. What are the multimodal means of ‘being Brooklynites’ and of creating a place and a sense of belonging? What discursive place-making activities can be observed? How do these index social value?
3. How and why do Brooklynites use processes of enregisterment to make a physical location a distinctive place (Busse & Warnke 2015; Cresswell 2004) that is phenomenologically dense with meaning, familiar and legible for its inhabitants, that styles authenticity and identity (cf. Eckert & Rickford 2001; Lacoste, Leimgruber, & Breyer 2014) and shows alignment with groups?
4. What are the (urban) values that are connected with (variable) language patterns?

In the next section, I will provide a brief outline of the theoretical context in which I situate the approach I propose in this paper. I will introduce the definition of ‘patterns’ that I will be working with, explain both the model of urbanity that I am drawing on as well as the notion of variational place-making, and show how all of these are linked to the concept of enregisterment. The next chapter will then present an application of the urbanity model by analysing repetitive practices of urban discursive place-making in a varied data set – interviews and examples from the semiotic landscape – in selected neighbourhoods of Brooklyn.

2Urban Semiotic Patterns and the Urbanity Model

Patterns are conceptualised as temporally and spatially situated configurations of linguistic and other semiotic signs which are repeated in a similar way, which are perceived as repetitive, which undergo transformations in space and time and which have constructive and social potential. Corpus linguistic identification and analysis of linguistic patterns have to be seen in a complex analytical framework of repetition based on frequency and of the saliency of repeated structures in relation to established norms analysed in, for example, specific text types, varieties or speech communities, and established by measuring the statistical association of e.g. words to constructions (e.g. Stubbs 2002; Hoey 2005; Gries 2008; Ebeling & Oksefjell Ebeling 2013; Biber & Barbieri 2007; Biber et al. 1999). A collocation is a case in point because in combinations of more than one word, where the focus is on the interplay between lexis and grammar, frequency of occurrence may be one criterion, but not the only one, as patterns may be highly frequent but not necessarily salient. Also, repetition, occurring at least once, may carry foregrounded functions which need to be analysed. And, finally, linguistic and multimodal pattern analysis also depends on and is influenced by how speakers and hearers use and perceive these repeated structures.

Corpus linguistic research has therefore also increasingly focused on how linguistic and other semiotic patterns and their variation serve as a resource for construing social meaning and identity in context (e.g. Baker 2014, Brookes, Harvey, & Mullany 2016, Partington, Duguid, & Taylor 2013). In corpus stylistics (Busse 2013, Busse 2014, Mahlberg 2013), it is now possible to even measure style, stylistic patterns and patterns of foregrounding (that is, parallelism and deviation) of collocations or keywords, for example, on a much broader scale, while, at the same time, linking these both quantitatively and qualitatively to functions and meanings in (historical) contexts of, for example, characterisation or social styling (Coupland 2007). This corpus linguistic notion of the relationship be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: On context and culture in corpus linguistics
• Part I: Discourse contexts and cultures
• Part II: Contexts of lexis and grammar
• Part III: Learner contexts
• List of contributors
• Index