here - Linguistic Society of America

Thursday, 3 JanuarySymposiumAnna Babel (The Ohio State University)Silence as control: shame and self-consciousness in sociolinguistic positioningSelf-conscious speech provides an environment in which we can distinguish the lack of awareness of norms from an absence ofcontrol. I demonstrate that speakers who position themselves in the context of an alternative value system as ‘traditional women’in a Quechua-Spanish contact situation perform a lack of control of a formal register of speech. The speakers demonstrate theirawareness of the conventions of a formal oratorical style not through emulation of the conventions of the genre, but throughsilence and subversion of sociolinguistic norms. I argue that it is problematic to characterize non-conformity to sociolinguisticnorms as a “lack” of control. Reluctance and refusal constitute a different kind of monitoring and self-control, harder to measureand quantify, but just as real as on-the-record speech.92