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Accomplishing Identity in Participant‐Denoting Discourse
Author(s) -
Wortham Stanton
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1525/jlin.2003.13.2.189
Subject(s) - parallelism (grammar) , identity (music) , identification (biology) , narrative , social identity theory , linguistics , participant observation , event (particle physics) , mechanism (biology) , psychology , social psychology , sociology , social group , epistemology , aesthetics , anthropology , philosophy , botany , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
Individuals become socially identified when categories of identity are used repeatedly to characterize them. Speech that denotes participants and involves parallelism between descriptions of participants and the events that they enact in the event of speaking can be a powerful mechanism for accomplishing consistent social identification. This article describes how two different types of participant‐denoting speech events—participant examples and autobiographical narratives—can involve such parallelism, in which speakers simultaneously represent and enact analogous social positions and thereby strengthen social identification.