1

LSA LI 2017 ndash Lecture 5 20 VII 17

VARIATION Language-communities and speech-communities How processes of enregisterment in standardization and similar value-conferring ideological regimes rest on naturalizing and essentalizing ideological projects effecting the ldquosuperpositionrdquo (Gumperz) of indexicality

It is important to see that this relationship between ideologically informed ethno-

metapragmatics and the workings of indexes is what we term a dialectic an asymmetric back-

and-forth of forces shaping potential signification in context an index is indeterminate in

contextualizing capacity without implying some functional metapragmatic some ldquointerpretantrdquo

as Peirce termed it that is a determining convention This can best be conceptualized by

explicating [Slide 1] (reproduced from Silverstein 2003195 2016fig3) intended as a

momentary snapshot diagram from ldquothe signrsquos eye point of viewrdquo of indexical presupposition

mapped into indexical entailment in-and-by the occurrence of some message-fraction

In this figure the lower block notes that a cumulatively non-incoherent denotational text

emerges in its context as a function minimally of [a] grammatico-semantic structural principles

by which any text-sentence can be parsed according to a system of grammar [b] the operational

scope and projectability of deictics [c] the components of denotational meaning of words and

expressions beyond the grammatico-semantic (see below) that contribute to the referring and

modally predicating character of denotational text and [d] the metricalized structuredness of the

emergent signal (including its text-sentence parsing) All of these factors organize the

denotational material beyond the grammatico-semantic ldquoliteralrdquo into denotational figurations or

tropes A vertical axis projects upward in the diagram to highlight our focus on a particular local

interval of discursive-interactional realtime in the emergence of such a denotational text-in-

context the ldquomomentrdquo-interval over which an isolable indexical sign-vehicle is being produced

here labeled as t0 The upper portion of the figure diagrams the semiotic processes by which in-

2

and-at the moment of emergence of such an indexical it presumes upon ndash indexcally

presupposes ndash such textuality and contextuality as have been established up to the moment as

indicated by a solid arrow pointing to the text unfolded up to that moment

Now we noted above the necessity for some meta-indexical interpretant to regiment the

entailments of indexical signs for their contexts in the figure the broken arrow pointing to the

entailed context is therefore not straightforward such entailment depends on ndash hence in the

figure loops back to ndash that necessary metapragmatic component of indexical function The

diagram illustrates moreover that the intuitive metapragmatic understanding of the language-

user is in turn shaped by explicit ascriptions of cause-and-effect relations of linguistic signs such

ascription being in essence lsquoIDEOLOGICALrsquo that is non-randomly distributed over the population

of language users in potentially non-disinterested ways and to the ends of particular social

projects identifiable with social groups and interests Both the metapragmatic ldquounconsciousrdquo and

the discourse of metapragmatic consciousness are ideologically informed in this sense in large

measure a function of an individualrsquos biography in society centrally his or her membership in

and alignment with certain categories differentiated in social process and with various primary

hellip and n-ary reference groups

The asymmetry of indexical presupposition and indexical entailment thus rests on the

asymmetric bi-directionality of the indexical (ldquopragmaticrdquo)mdashmeta-indexical (ldquometa-pragmaticrdquo)

relationship in which denotational textuality and its particular formally segmentable units lurk

For example as has now long been a heuristically reliable guide metapragmatic consciousness

and hence LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY as we can term language-focused ideologies of indexicality

tends ascriptively and interpretatively to focus on segments that emerge to denotational and even

grammatico-semantic parsing This seems to be the case even where the functionality ascribed

3

to such indexicals is not denotational as such The very units of denotational textual form seem

to be the anchors of consciousness of contextual ndash that is indexical ndash variation in language

especially lexical units words and expressions that constitute the identifiable linear flow of

discourse rendered into textual structure

So to understand some signal that works indexically by convention there is the logical

direction index-to-metapragmatic interpretant but that metapragmatic interpretant may be ndash as

Susan Gal points out ndash at the same time rhematizing as Peirce termed this kind of semiotic

ldquodownshiftingrdquo ndash essentializing and naturalizing in the manner of seeing an icon (a likeness of

signal and that which it signals) underlying and motivating the indexicality ndash and thus the

direction metapragmatic interpretant-to-index may superimpose something quite other creating

in effect what Irsquove termed a second-order indexicality that supervenes on the first-order coming

from the other direction So we launch indexicals on the basis of presupposition and they do

cultural work as it were in entailing a consequential contextual configuration only as washed in

the inevitable goo of ideological interest underlying our metapragmatics Recall TV

phenomena and honorific lexical registers while the first-order indexicality is presumably

focused on the Addressee the Referent or whatever the second-order indexicality is ironically

focused on the Speaker or Sender by the lsquoalus is as lsquoalus does essentialization

This is particularly true if you recall from last time as language users conceptualize

contextual variability as ldquodifferent [context-indexing] ways of [denotationally] saying lsquothe samersquo

thingrdquo at whatever plane and level of analysis the isolable formal differences constituting as we

exemplified last time a (sometimes gradient) paradigm of indexical signs appropriate to distinct

contextual conditions in short a PRAGMATIC PARADIGM Speakers have intuitions ndash sometimes

even explicit normative stipulations ndash of how one or more elements of such paradigmatically

4

differentiated indexes can appropriately ndash congruently ndash co-occur across textual stretches Such

principles define a DENOTATIONAL-TEXTUAL REGISTER for the users of language an intuition (or

stipulation) of which textual elements go together with which others and which ought to be

excluded from textual co-occurrence ndash save for producing (entailing) special effects by violation

Registers are always projected from REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS which serve as salient anchors or

pillars of co-occurrence for other less salient areas of denotational textual form to which users

pay less attention even though they use them consistently

Language ideologies can be said to underlie our metapragmatic (un)conscious our sense

of register and of pragmatic paradigms Ideologies are in short socially distributed cultural

models of the experienceable realities of language structure and use (or function) that have an

impact on the immediate metapragmatic orientation of participants in discursive interaction

[Slide 2] Like all cultural material as sociologists and anthropologists we gather evidence for the

ideological structure by triangulating across three kinds of evidence [1] observable usage which

can be scored by user as well as by any other descriptive contextual variable especially as such

usage in one context can be seen in structures of interdiscursivity leading back to relatively

authoritative ritual(ized) usage in institutionally central contexts [2] metapragmatic discourse

metalanguage and other kinds of reactive reponses to language-in-use that reveal explicit

evaluative dimensions and coherences of linguistic variability such as named registers

motivational and other explications of why someone usesdoes not use particular forms in

context and [3] analogical structures of evaluation implicit in the ways that language use may be

considered an aspect of some larger cultural realm or parallel to some other kind of behavioral

form for example modes of ideological ldquonaturalizationrdquo of languagersquos indexical value in terms

5

of value-laden essences consider lsquovulgarrsquo language bespeaking a lsquovulgarrsquo soul (nature or

nurture Professor Higgins) or lsquoslow Southern drawlrsquo bespeaking lsquoslow-wittednessrsquo

Recall from last time that we are worrying the tension between the inevitable variance or

dispersion around means of token forms of social behaviors like linguistic material and the

possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and other-

identification in events of social coordination Physical variance of signals of sign-vehicles is

an inevitable fact of life but how does there arise or emerge an organization of such variance

into actual valorized indexical conventions is the question What are the semiotic processes

producing conventional ndash sociocultural ndash indexicality in social groups like language communities

for which we can find evidence (A language community or linguistic community is a group

demonstrating allegiance to a denotational norm however members of the group understand that

there is contextual variation ndash which they understand via enregisterment A speech community

is a community by virtue of norms of indexical practice no matter how many denotational codes

are involved) Letrsquos take the example of standard registers in language communities where the

norms are informed by the existence of such called standard (or standardized) languages So

letrsquos talk about standardization as a kind of enregisterment within a particular ideological

formation

For any linguist in America therersquos always that cringe-worthy moment that canrsquot-I-find-

a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work centers on language when we are out-

and-about being social Inevitably someone will ask ldquoWhat do you do for a livingrdquo and when

offered the reply that one is a professor and of matters linguistic at that with a high degree of

predictability comes the response ldquoOh I better watch what I say thenrdquo or ldquoI better watch the

way I talk to yourdquo Language scientists linguists are inevitably confused with the diction

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

2

and-at the moment of emergence of such an indexical it presumes upon ndash indexcally

presupposes ndash such textuality and contextuality as have been established up to the moment as

indicated by a solid arrow pointing to the text unfolded up to that moment

Now we noted above the necessity for some meta-indexical interpretant to regiment the

entailments of indexical signs for their contexts in the figure the broken arrow pointing to the

entailed context is therefore not straightforward such entailment depends on ndash hence in the

figure loops back to ndash that necessary metapragmatic component of indexical function The

diagram illustrates moreover that the intuitive metapragmatic understanding of the language-

user is in turn shaped by explicit ascriptions of cause-and-effect relations of linguistic signs such

ascription being in essence lsquoIDEOLOGICALrsquo that is non-randomly distributed over the population

of language users in potentially non-disinterested ways and to the ends of particular social

projects identifiable with social groups and interests Both the metapragmatic ldquounconsciousrdquo and

the discourse of metapragmatic consciousness are ideologically informed in this sense in large

measure a function of an individualrsquos biography in society centrally his or her membership in

and alignment with certain categories differentiated in social process and with various primary

hellip and n-ary reference groups

The asymmetry of indexical presupposition and indexical entailment thus rests on the

asymmetric bi-directionality of the indexical (ldquopragmaticrdquo)mdashmeta-indexical (ldquometa-pragmaticrdquo)

relationship in which denotational textuality and its particular formally segmentable units lurk

For example as has now long been a heuristically reliable guide metapragmatic consciousness

and hence LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY as we can term language-focused ideologies of indexicality

tends ascriptively and interpretatively to focus on segments that emerge to denotational and even

grammatico-semantic parsing This seems to be the case even where the functionality ascribed

3

to such indexicals is not denotational as such The very units of denotational textual form seem

to be the anchors of consciousness of contextual ndash that is indexical ndash variation in language

especially lexical units words and expressions that constitute the identifiable linear flow of

discourse rendered into textual structure

So to understand some signal that works indexically by convention there is the logical

direction index-to-metapragmatic interpretant but that metapragmatic interpretant may be ndash as

Susan Gal points out ndash at the same time rhematizing as Peirce termed this kind of semiotic

ldquodownshiftingrdquo ndash essentializing and naturalizing in the manner of seeing an icon (a likeness of

signal and that which it signals) underlying and motivating the indexicality ndash and thus the

direction metapragmatic interpretant-to-index may superimpose something quite other creating

in effect what Irsquove termed a second-order indexicality that supervenes on the first-order coming

from the other direction So we launch indexicals on the basis of presupposition and they do

cultural work as it were in entailing a consequential contextual configuration only as washed in

the inevitable goo of ideological interest underlying our metapragmatics Recall TV

phenomena and honorific lexical registers while the first-order indexicality is presumably

focused on the Addressee the Referent or whatever the second-order indexicality is ironically

focused on the Speaker or Sender by the lsquoalus is as lsquoalus does essentialization

This is particularly true if you recall from last time as language users conceptualize

contextual variability as ldquodifferent [context-indexing] ways of [denotationally] saying lsquothe samersquo

thingrdquo at whatever plane and level of analysis the isolable formal differences constituting as we

exemplified last time a (sometimes gradient) paradigm of indexical signs appropriate to distinct

contextual conditions in short a PRAGMATIC PARADIGM Speakers have intuitions ndash sometimes

even explicit normative stipulations ndash of how one or more elements of such paradigmatically

4

differentiated indexes can appropriately ndash congruently ndash co-occur across textual stretches Such

principles define a DENOTATIONAL-TEXTUAL REGISTER for the users of language an intuition (or

stipulation) of which textual elements go together with which others and which ought to be

excluded from textual co-occurrence ndash save for producing (entailing) special effects by violation

Registers are always projected from REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS which serve as salient anchors or

pillars of co-occurrence for other less salient areas of denotational textual form to which users

pay less attention even though they use them consistently

Language ideologies can be said to underlie our metapragmatic (un)conscious our sense

of register and of pragmatic paradigms Ideologies are in short socially distributed cultural

models of the experienceable realities of language structure and use (or function) that have an

impact on the immediate metapragmatic orientation of participants in discursive interaction

[Slide 2] Like all cultural material as sociologists and anthropologists we gather evidence for the

ideological structure by triangulating across three kinds of evidence [1] observable usage which

can be scored by user as well as by any other descriptive contextual variable especially as such

usage in one context can be seen in structures of interdiscursivity leading back to relatively

authoritative ritual(ized) usage in institutionally central contexts [2] metapragmatic discourse

metalanguage and other kinds of reactive reponses to language-in-use that reveal explicit

evaluative dimensions and coherences of linguistic variability such as named registers

motivational and other explications of why someone usesdoes not use particular forms in

context and [3] analogical structures of evaluation implicit in the ways that language use may be

considered an aspect of some larger cultural realm or parallel to some other kind of behavioral

form for example modes of ideological ldquonaturalizationrdquo of languagersquos indexical value in terms

5

of value-laden essences consider lsquovulgarrsquo language bespeaking a lsquovulgarrsquo soul (nature or

nurture Professor Higgins) or lsquoslow Southern drawlrsquo bespeaking lsquoslow-wittednessrsquo

Recall from last time that we are worrying the tension between the inevitable variance or

dispersion around means of token forms of social behaviors like linguistic material and the

possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and other-

identification in events of social coordination Physical variance of signals of sign-vehicles is

an inevitable fact of life but how does there arise or emerge an organization of such variance

into actual valorized indexical conventions is the question What are the semiotic processes

producing conventional ndash sociocultural ndash indexicality in social groups like language communities

for which we can find evidence (A language community or linguistic community is a group

demonstrating allegiance to a denotational norm however members of the group understand that

there is contextual variation ndash which they understand via enregisterment A speech community

is a community by virtue of norms of indexical practice no matter how many denotational codes

are involved) Letrsquos take the example of standard registers in language communities where the

norms are informed by the existence of such called standard (or standardized) languages So

letrsquos talk about standardization as a kind of enregisterment within a particular ideological

formation

For any linguist in America therersquos always that cringe-worthy moment that canrsquot-I-find-

a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work centers on language when we are out-

and-about being social Inevitably someone will ask ldquoWhat do you do for a livingrdquo and when

offered the reply that one is a professor and of matters linguistic at that with a high degree of

predictability comes the response ldquoOh I better watch what I say thenrdquo or ldquoI better watch the

way I talk to yourdquo Language scientists linguists are inevitably confused with the diction

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

3

to such indexicals is not denotational as such The very units of denotational textual form seem

to be the anchors of consciousness of contextual ndash that is indexical ndash variation in language

especially lexical units words and expressions that constitute the identifiable linear flow of

discourse rendered into textual structure

So to understand some signal that works indexically by convention there is the logical

direction index-to-metapragmatic interpretant but that metapragmatic interpretant may be ndash as

Susan Gal points out ndash at the same time rhematizing as Peirce termed this kind of semiotic

ldquodownshiftingrdquo ndash essentializing and naturalizing in the manner of seeing an icon (a likeness of

signal and that which it signals) underlying and motivating the indexicality ndash and thus the

direction metapragmatic interpretant-to-index may superimpose something quite other creating

in effect what Irsquove termed a second-order indexicality that supervenes on the first-order coming

from the other direction So we launch indexicals on the basis of presupposition and they do

cultural work as it were in entailing a consequential contextual configuration only as washed in

the inevitable goo of ideological interest underlying our metapragmatics Recall TV

phenomena and honorific lexical registers while the first-order indexicality is presumably

focused on the Addressee the Referent or whatever the second-order indexicality is ironically

focused on the Speaker or Sender by the lsquoalus is as lsquoalus does essentialization

This is particularly true if you recall from last time as language users conceptualize

contextual variability as ldquodifferent [context-indexing] ways of [denotationally] saying lsquothe samersquo

thingrdquo at whatever plane and level of analysis the isolable formal differences constituting as we

exemplified last time a (sometimes gradient) paradigm of indexical signs appropriate to distinct

contextual conditions in short a PRAGMATIC PARADIGM Speakers have intuitions ndash sometimes

even explicit normative stipulations ndash of how one or more elements of such paradigmatically

4

differentiated indexes can appropriately ndash congruently ndash co-occur across textual stretches Such

principles define a DENOTATIONAL-TEXTUAL REGISTER for the users of language an intuition (or

stipulation) of which textual elements go together with which others and which ought to be

excluded from textual co-occurrence ndash save for producing (entailing) special effects by violation

Registers are always projected from REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS which serve as salient anchors or

pillars of co-occurrence for other less salient areas of denotational textual form to which users

pay less attention even though they use them consistently

Language ideologies can be said to underlie our metapragmatic (un)conscious our sense

of register and of pragmatic paradigms Ideologies are in short socially distributed cultural

models of the experienceable realities of language structure and use (or function) that have an

impact on the immediate metapragmatic orientation of participants in discursive interaction

[Slide 2] Like all cultural material as sociologists and anthropologists we gather evidence for the

ideological structure by triangulating across three kinds of evidence [1] observable usage which

can be scored by user as well as by any other descriptive contextual variable especially as such

usage in one context can be seen in structures of interdiscursivity leading back to relatively

authoritative ritual(ized) usage in institutionally central contexts [2] metapragmatic discourse

metalanguage and other kinds of reactive reponses to language-in-use that reveal explicit

evaluative dimensions and coherences of linguistic variability such as named registers

motivational and other explications of why someone usesdoes not use particular forms in

context and [3] analogical structures of evaluation implicit in the ways that language use may be

considered an aspect of some larger cultural realm or parallel to some other kind of behavioral

form for example modes of ideological ldquonaturalizationrdquo of languagersquos indexical value in terms

5

of value-laden essences consider lsquovulgarrsquo language bespeaking a lsquovulgarrsquo soul (nature or

nurture Professor Higgins) or lsquoslow Southern drawlrsquo bespeaking lsquoslow-wittednessrsquo

Recall from last time that we are worrying the tension between the inevitable variance or

dispersion around means of token forms of social behaviors like linguistic material and the

possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and other-

identification in events of social coordination Physical variance of signals of sign-vehicles is

an inevitable fact of life but how does there arise or emerge an organization of such variance

into actual valorized indexical conventions is the question What are the semiotic processes

producing conventional ndash sociocultural ndash indexicality in social groups like language communities

for which we can find evidence (A language community or linguistic community is a group

demonstrating allegiance to a denotational norm however members of the group understand that

there is contextual variation ndash which they understand via enregisterment A speech community

is a community by virtue of norms of indexical practice no matter how many denotational codes

are involved) Letrsquos take the example of standard registers in language communities where the

norms are informed by the existence of such called standard (or standardized) languages So

letrsquos talk about standardization as a kind of enregisterment within a particular ideological

formation

For any linguist in America therersquos always that cringe-worthy moment that canrsquot-I-find-

a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work centers on language when we are out-

and-about being social Inevitably someone will ask ldquoWhat do you do for a livingrdquo and when

offered the reply that one is a professor and of matters linguistic at that with a high degree of

predictability comes the response ldquoOh I better watch what I say thenrdquo or ldquoI better watch the

way I talk to yourdquo Language scientists linguists are inevitably confused with the diction

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

4

differentiated indexes can appropriately ndash congruently ndash co-occur across textual stretches Such

principles define a DENOTATIONAL-TEXTUAL REGISTER for the users of language an intuition (or

stipulation) of which textual elements go together with which others and which ought to be

excluded from textual co-occurrence ndash save for producing (entailing) special effects by violation

Registers are always projected from REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS which serve as salient anchors or

pillars of co-occurrence for other less salient areas of denotational textual form to which users

pay less attention even though they use them consistently

Language ideologies can be said to underlie our metapragmatic (un)conscious our sense

of register and of pragmatic paradigms Ideologies are in short socially distributed cultural

models of the experienceable realities of language structure and use (or function) that have an

impact on the immediate metapragmatic orientation of participants in discursive interaction

[Slide 2] Like all cultural material as sociologists and anthropologists we gather evidence for the

ideological structure by triangulating across three kinds of evidence [1] observable usage which

can be scored by user as well as by any other descriptive contextual variable especially as such

usage in one context can be seen in structures of interdiscursivity leading back to relatively

authoritative ritual(ized) usage in institutionally central contexts [2] metapragmatic discourse

metalanguage and other kinds of reactive reponses to language-in-use that reveal explicit

evaluative dimensions and coherences of linguistic variability such as named registers

motivational and other explications of why someone usesdoes not use particular forms in

context and [3] analogical structures of evaluation implicit in the ways that language use may be

considered an aspect of some larger cultural realm or parallel to some other kind of behavioral

form for example modes of ideological ldquonaturalizationrdquo of languagersquos indexical value in terms

5

of value-laden essences consider lsquovulgarrsquo language bespeaking a lsquovulgarrsquo soul (nature or

nurture Professor Higgins) or lsquoslow Southern drawlrsquo bespeaking lsquoslow-wittednessrsquo

Recall from last time that we are worrying the tension between the inevitable variance or

dispersion around means of token forms of social behaviors like linguistic material and the

possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and other-

identification in events of social coordination Physical variance of signals of sign-vehicles is

an inevitable fact of life but how does there arise or emerge an organization of such variance

into actual valorized indexical conventions is the question What are the semiotic processes

producing conventional ndash sociocultural ndash indexicality in social groups like language communities

for which we can find evidence (A language community or linguistic community is a group

demonstrating allegiance to a denotational norm however members of the group understand that

there is contextual variation ndash which they understand via enregisterment A speech community

is a community by virtue of norms of indexical practice no matter how many denotational codes

are involved) Letrsquos take the example of standard registers in language communities where the

norms are informed by the existence of such called standard (or standardized) languages So

letrsquos talk about standardization as a kind of enregisterment within a particular ideological

formation

For any linguist in America therersquos always that cringe-worthy moment that canrsquot-I-find-

a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work centers on language when we are out-

and-about being social Inevitably someone will ask ldquoWhat do you do for a livingrdquo and when

offered the reply that one is a professor and of matters linguistic at that with a high degree of

predictability comes the response ldquoOh I better watch what I say thenrdquo or ldquoI better watch the

way I talk to yourdquo Language scientists linguists are inevitably confused with the diction

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

5

of value-laden essences consider lsquovulgarrsquo language bespeaking a lsquovulgarrsquo soul (nature or

nurture Professor Higgins) or lsquoslow Southern drawlrsquo bespeaking lsquoslow-wittednessrsquo

Recall from last time that we are worrying the tension between the inevitable variance or

dispersion around means of token forms of social behaviors like linguistic material and the

possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and other-

identification in events of social coordination Physical variance of signals of sign-vehicles is

an inevitable fact of life but how does there arise or emerge an organization of such variance

into actual valorized indexical conventions is the question What are the semiotic processes

producing conventional ndash sociocultural ndash indexicality in social groups like language communities

for which we can find evidence (A language community or linguistic community is a group

demonstrating allegiance to a denotational norm however members of the group understand that

there is contextual variation ndash which they understand via enregisterment A speech community

is a community by virtue of norms of indexical practice no matter how many denotational codes

are involved) Letrsquos take the example of standard registers in language communities where the

norms are informed by the existence of such called standard (or standardized) languages So

letrsquos talk about standardization as a kind of enregisterment within a particular ideological

formation

For any linguist in America therersquos always that cringe-worthy moment that canrsquot-I-find-

a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work centers on language when we are out-

and-about being social Inevitably someone will ask ldquoWhat do you do for a livingrdquo and when

offered the reply that one is a professor and of matters linguistic at that with a high degree of

predictability comes the response ldquoOh I better watch what I say thenrdquo or ldquoI better watch the

way I talk to yourdquo Language scientists linguists are inevitably confused with the diction

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

6

enforcer the grammar police the alphabet soup Nazi No amount of explanation will do that our

deep ndash and I can assure you non-judgmental ndash interest is in the variety of language in its socio-

cultural context and in culturally significant difference arising from the way language is used to

social purpose Nope Laypersons in our kind of language community associate anyone

interested in language ndash even in language as socio-culturally contextualized ndash with what is in

their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own ndash of our ndash language the fact

of standardization Standardization is a very particular condition of language while every

language like every culture is a value system with underlying norms of how to do things

however in flux only some languages have undergone standardization English like all its

European counterparts has indeed undergone standardization ndash in fact multiple standardizations

as it has spread globally

Standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms peoplersquos consciousness

of their own language It becomes a lens through which they perceive process and evaluate the

ubiquitous and inevitable situational variability of how language is actually used To those

within the language community the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational way of using

language to communicate about to represent the universe of experience and imagination a form

of language spoken or written ldquofrom nowhererdquo ndash that is from anywhere and everywhere within

the sociological envelope of the language community Standard is what one should be using

Period Although we all know that for some folks ndash like all of us ndash and for some situations ndash

like most ndash dat ainrsquo də way we talk My nervous conversational partners know this and are

somewhat embarrassed to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven

Here then is a pictorial representation of how the culture of standard construes it as ldquothe

voice from nowhererdquo [Slide 3] Remember this is a cultural model the nativesrsquo point of view

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

7

It is a conic multi-dimensional radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language

community in which [Slide 4] any noticeable deviation from standard points to ndash INDEXES is of

course the technical term ndash some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers of their

addresseesor in short of anything characterizing the situation in which forms of the non-

standard occur Such deviations from standard are in general thought of in negative terms ndash

what I label as degrees of ldquodown-and-outrdquo-ness (for comic as well as conic effect) And when

the conical model of standardization and divergience from it is concretized as a representation of

a political economy of social stratification speakers inevitably locate themselves in class

fractions by the degree to which their language use approximates or fails to approximate standard

usage You may recall the old saying ldquoSpeak so that I may know who [that is of course

sociologically speaking what social kind] you arerdquo And you may recall George Bernard

Shawrsquos Pygmalion transduced into Lerner amp Lowersquos Broadway musical My Fair Lady [Slide

5] in which the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics

Professor Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the phonetics of

British Standard called lsquoRPrsquo (Received Pronunciation) and by substituting standard syntax and

phraseology for vernacular forms Plus the sartorial make-over of course to which we will

return Shaw and the upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the

cultural cone of standardization (I love the way the Broadway production has the angelic Shaw

ultimately pulling the strings on Julie Andrewsrsquos Eliza the film poster [Slide 6] ndash replacing

Andrews with the visually stunning Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive

Marnie Nixon ndash is much less sophisticated But in keeping with my theme this afternoon note

the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to Hollywood in both graphic

and iconographic styles)

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

8

[Slide 7] The cone of standardization as I said is a cultural model of variation in a

language community like ours ndash an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological model we like to say

that makes sense to the natives And its strength its force as an effective cultural standard

influencing people has like all ideological formations a characteristic social distribution within

the population People who use language within a standardized language community reveal

differential allegiance to the standard and to the whole conical model to which those most in its

thrall are anxiously oriented This was elegantly demonstrated a half-century ago by William

Labovrsquos studies of urban American English principally in New York City and in Philadelphia

where statistical curves plotted of rates of observed standard and non-standard usage like that of

[Slide 8] tell an interesting story about cultural ideology more generally Shown here are the

results for speakers of New York City English on Manhattanrsquos Lower East Side the long-ago

immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity These data come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest

Standardization of languages is the creation of a standard register gradiently available to

those within a language community those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm

(ldquoqui ont le sentiment et la volonteacute de parler la mecircme languerdquo as Saussurersquos prize student and

successor Antoine Meillet put it) Even within standard there are paraphernalia to ratchet up the

anxieties about verbal behavior such as [Slide 9] this flyer that arrived in my American Express

bill ca 1983 or 1984 ndash the Reagan Era in the United States of the emergence of anxious

corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such items in a year-long

study of lsquomonoglot standardrsquo in America) You will note not only the specific vocabulary ndash with

French and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-Latinate

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

9

derivatives ndash but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create anxieties of deficiency

before the particular educated standard of ldquowell-informed peoplerdquo How many of these

vocabulary items do you know the brochure asks emphasizing ndash as does of course something

like the SAT or GRE examination ndash the gradient nature of educated standard something one can

possess by degrees [certainly the credential of the University of Chicago Itrsquos the ultimate

degree] [Slide 10] And note this cartoon with the less and more pricey kinds of round red

everyday vegetables the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm of the stressed syllabic

vowel [έy] vs [άˑ] as in tom[έy]to vs tom[άˑ]to the latter with its class ascendant snootiness

All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural forms language

included [Slide 11] At any given socio-historical moment there is a collection of salient

linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions of ldquodordquos and ldquodonrsquotrdquos in other words that serve as

what we term STANDARD REGISTER SHIBBOLETHS to which adherence is demanded as one is or

aspires to be at the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective Yet we know that the

actual contents of the collection of shibboleths changes over time an inevitable conclusion we

arrive at from studying the printed record of long-term standardized communities ndash or as we

know even from interacting with our grandparents and other elders who deplore our inattention

to former shibboleths no longer salient [Slide 12] (ldquoI shall go to schoolrdquo but ldquoYou will go to

schoolrdquo anyone the standard of my motherrsquos day in the 1920s ldquoWith whom do you wish to

speakrdquo of that time vs our acceptable ldquoWho do you want to talk tordquo) We should see that ideas

of correctness of form and usage as ldquostandardrdquo are temporally bound though at all times

institutionalized and which institutional forms inculcate monitor and police peoplersquos adherence

to standard sometimes shift as well as the social organization of standardizing authority and its

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

10

paraphernalia transform over time Yet standardization has recurrent common properties as a

social process [Slide 13]

Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous orientation of large

percentages of language users to the correctness of standard register and the gradient ndash if

sociologically colorful and indicative ndash incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short

thus marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged ndash or at least identity-laden ndash

ldquosomewhererdquo Fiercely achieving standardization of a state language has been a major project of

the modernist nation-state insofar projecting a language community into a maximal polity in the

Enlightenment order of things what Irsquove termed after the writer Washington Irving the project

of ldquologocracyrdquo ndash government mediated by language practices ndash such as we live under in the

United States and other nation-states of the Euro-American ldquoNorthrdquo And the fiercer that

identifiability of language community and maximal polity the more under siege are vernaculars

within a nation-statersquos borders as well as other language communities whether indigenous or

immigrant whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or not ndash as has long been

the case here in the United States (Think of the Spanish within the US borders standardized

for most first-language speakers in either Mexico City or San Juan but de-valued nonetheless in

our fiercely monoglot logocracy)

Postvocalic ltrgt in NYC is what Labov termed a ldquosociolinguistic markerrdquo where there is

not only difference of frequency of appearance in samples of speech of individuals categorized

by some macro-social category but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to

task demand (Labov thinks it is the degree to which people are paying attention to their speech

but we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel compelled to index allegiance to

standard register inculcated through graphic practices) He contrasts this with mere difference

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

11

correlated with macro-social or demographic categories ndash his ldquoindicatorsrdquo [cf lsquoindexrsquo] ndash and

with intentionally performable modeling ndash his ldquostereotypesrdquo We will more adequately place this

material by thinking about this cline in terms of enregisterment

Letrsquos return to Labovrsquos data repeated in [Slide 14] which come from surveys and in-

depth interviews of the early 1960s when that area in Manhattan was just beginning to gentrify

in earnest The scale on the ordinate the y-axis derives from percent of standard-like

performance of syllables with an r following a vowel in standard pronunciation ndash note the

examples of such forms at the bottom guard car beer beard ndash where the local NYC vernacular

notoriously lacks it (thus rhyming in effect with god cod [without the final ndashd] be a be a

followed by a word with initial [d-]hellip) Thus as shown in [Slide 15] the post-World War II

standard ldquoHe [sɒʹɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ]rdquo contrasts with the local non-innovating

vernacular non-standard ldquoHe [sɔd] high above the [fɔθ flɔ]rdquo Labovrsquos data show the high

degree of enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction hellipr hellipOslash as a salient

register shibboleth The curves in the plot of rates of production of postvocalic [r] separate the

speakers in Labovrsquos sample by an independent demographic measure of socio-economic class

category from what Labov terms the ldquoLower Working Classrdquo at the visual bottom to the ldquoUpper

Middle Classrdquo number 9 at the top Running horizontally along the abscissa the x-axis are

contexts of speaking producing articulate language arranged in increasing order of the way that

the task demands of producing speech seem to call speakersrsquo reflexive attention to ndash mid-way

through the series at C ndash reading aloud and at the extreme right at D-prime the task of having

phonetically to differentiate two isolated words spelled with minimal difference like [Slide 16]

ltsawedgt the past tense of saw- and ltsoaredgt the past tense of soar- visually differentiable

only in the middle letters Plotted on the extreme left at A are measures of peoplersquos usage when

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

12

they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate in-group conversation ndash

something our human subjects Institutional Review Board will probably no longer let us do

Next at B is the context defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about

the intervieweersquos perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of others The

next position on the abscissa at C is when the speaker is asked to read a passage from a page of

print (a passage with lots of words where standard would require post-vocalic [r]-pronunciation

in fact though the speaker is not informed of this) Then in context D the interviewee is asked

to read aloud slowly lists of printed words interspersed among them target words to test

particular pronunciations of this variably standardized sort And finally at Dʹ the so-called

minimal graphic pairs test look at the two words and then pronounce them aloud Given the

long history of the association of standardization in Euro-American and thence in more recent

post-colonial contexts with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and the graphic-to-

phonicphonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and writing recall that Bloomfield (1927)

spoke of folk concepts of ldquolanguagerdquo and ldquodialectrdquo ie standard and non-standard registers in

folk terms of ldquoliteraterdquo and ldquoilliteraterdquo speech No one wants to be revealed as ldquoilliteraterdquo in this

sense certainly not those who showed most movement in rates of standard-pronunciation in

Labovrsquos little exercises

The results are plotted separately by socio-economic class demographics of speakers

First note that the most horizontal curves the ones with low slopes of change across these tasks

occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales The folks at the bottom are comparatively

unaffected by the different task demands of speaking maintaining with a slight but indeed

noticeable increase a fairly non-standard pronunciation throughout They are not as we can see

very much mobilized to and apparently behaviorally motivated by cultural concepts of standard

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

13

speech (In fact in subsequent work in comparably urban locations in the British Isles and

elsewhere it was demonstrated that working class speakers have allegiance to and are

behaviorally motivated in their usage to speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard

misinterpreted by sociolinguists as ldquonegative prestigerdquo Culturally of course the ldquoprestigerdquo of

being a non-cosmopolitan local is anything but ldquonegativerdquo It is being genuine or ldquoauthenticrdquo to

your primary reference group) The Upper Middle Class folks in category 9 at the top produce

relatively standard speech in all of these contexts of performance perhaps a bit more carefully

standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them The interest lies in the middle

groups all of whom as we can see are relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their

spontaneous in-group conversational usage However as soon as the folks that Labov terms the

aspiring upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented with something to read aloud their

standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation When

we look at this grouprsquos performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions D and

Dʹ their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper Middle Class which sets a kind

of benchmark of usage for the whole population in such regimes of standardization The anxious

Lower Middle Class speakers ndash as Labov terms it ndash ldquohypercorrectrdquo by producing too much of

what is culturally evaluated as ldquoa good thingrdquo that is standard-like postvocalic [r]s ndash so much so

that they put them in as it turns out where they donrsquot even belong according to the rules by

which one converts visual into spoken when one looks at print and pronounces its forms aloud

I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger acuity and Labov confirmed this with numerous

correlated attitudinal measures of what he terms ldquolinguistic insecurityrdquo before standard register

His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the ideological culture of

standardization maximally anxious about fulfilling its dictates and acute in monitoring and

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

14

criticizing the performance of others (Many could not even recognize themselves when

listening to recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played back for them

to review)

This is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven stratification where some

behavioral characteristic is considered the neutral top-and-center standard considered to be the

universal social solvent in institutions of the public sphere and anchored by massive inculcation

that itself is differentially successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population

Indeed the so-called ldquoupper middle classrdquo professionals ndash lawyers physicians professors

corporate middle-management ndash who earn their living and the esteem of their consociates

through verbal skills centered on standard are privileged to speak this register ideologically

endowed with indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality while those

speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along one or another axis of

differentiation as ldquospeaking like a helliprdquo indexed by these very forms

The matter here in other words has nothing to do with attention to or consciousness of

how we self-present in the verbal channel the sharpness and degree of shift from non-standard

toward standard is the index of onersquos position within this sociolinguistics of orientation to and

anxiety before standard register No wonder ldquocovert [or negative] prestigerdquo (Trudgill 1972) a

ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that sometimes people spoke ndash and wanted to speak ndash

in highly non-standard ways was encountered in those for whom affiliations with local social

structures permeated peoplersquos primary reference groups (a finding one might add not only in

Norwich but earlier ndash though unnamed ndash in Martharsquos Vineyard [Labov 1963])

But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this sort establishing of

baseline norms for phonology depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

15

relative to which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a sometimes

complex envelope of enregisterment competing register formations emanating from different

ldquoritualrdquo-like value-setting sites intersecting in the usage of individuals defined by category- and

group-memberships Every anthropological linguistic field worker has had this experience of

encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken performance) of lexical

forms of sometimes subtle ndash and sometimes not so subtle (eg [vέys] [vάz] for English

orthographic ltvasegt cf Labov 1972251n42) ndash segmental substitutions characteristic phonetic

overlaps etc not to mention phonological indexicalities like augmentativemdashdiminutive systems

we may not at first suspect exist No less a figure than Bloomfield with his obsessive concern

for inductive operationalism was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini but finally

realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the necessary model for asserting the

community norm was a prerequisite to understanding variance overlap etc (See Bloomfield

1939115 Hockett ed 1970367-368 Goddard 1987 esp 181-196) It is perhaps no wonder

that one can count on the fingers of one hand the attempts to do serious variationist phonetic

analysis in the absence of a standardized register or its equivalent as for example indicated by

orthography or other socially licensed authority Or complementarily one can note the lack of a

serious locally relevant autonomous phonological ndash or grammatical ndash analysis serving as a

prerequisite to doing variationist correlations (See now Dorian 2010 on the character of

sociolinguistic variation in local non-standardized languages such as the East Sutherland

Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for ca 60 years)

Indeed one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in what became a

still-born part of Labovrsquos dissertation (1966507-575) based on his Lower East Side survey in

New Yorkrsquos borough of Manhattan in the early 1960s After reviewing the various correlations

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

16

in overall performance profiles on a more-or-less variable by variable basis Labov synthesizes

his results in the final chapter ndash making reference to Martinet by the way ndash with a striking set of

reconstructions of what we can understand are covariations within vocalic registers strongly

associated with the 20th centuryrsquos dynamics of class stratification with ethnic differentiation etc

He is able to diagram an interpretation of the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation

in performance as a set of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be

attempting to hit as it were in their identity-indexing usage (See his Figure 5 and Figure 6

reproduced here in [Slide 17]) [Slide 18] What this reveals is that working-class white ethnics ndash

principally Jews and Italians at the time ndash seem to have a three-vowel ldquoinglidingrdquo enregistered

system ah ih uh upper-middle-class professionals index their identity by a corresponding

five- or actually six-vowel vocalic register The details can be studied in the original work but

what is important to note is that the statistical measures needed are not per-subject overall scores

of one phonological variable at a time a methodological blunder still alas common among

variationist studies but scores of production over stretches of functionally coherent speech of

co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting such identity-indexing registers so

as to reveal the stylistic silhouette as it were which a speaker is attempting oriented to self-

expression through such indexically significant projection ndash what Labov himself prefiguring

Pierre Bourdieu (199181-89) terms ldquoarticulatory gesture hellip phonological posturerdquo (1966567)

So standards are cultural forms configurations of linguistic culture locatable in time

indeed they are organized around ever-changing and socio-historically specific prescriptions for

one among a range of variants and proscriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally

persist within overall community usage They are used by those who do not speak well or ndash as

we say ndash who speak not up to standard Yet at all times the standard forms have ever been

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

17

ideologically justified that is metapragmatically rationalized by interests that support them in

terms of myriad ascribed virtues essential properties such as truthfulness transparency to

ldquorealityrdquo beauty cognitive and expressive power communicative efficiency etc that come to

be identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well in a certain logic of

iconic consubstantiality ndash the technical term from Peirce is lsquorhematizedrsquo ndash identified as and with

the virtues of the very people who can display them properly by contrast the opposite vices

needless to say come to be identified with non-standard forms and by similar indexically based

iconic association with the users of non-standard linguistic forms who on the basis of language

are understood by those anxiously oriented to the top-and-center to be by contrast stupid

muddled vis-agrave-vis ldquorealityrdquo brutish unaesthetic uneducable and so forth Irsquom sure that you

have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print and have heard them in broadcast

and web media ndash and perhaps even in various face-to-face situations such as the social gatherings

with which I began a personrsquos deficiency in or ndash heaven forfend ndash total lack of standard English

bespeaks ndash it is an index of ndash that individualrsquos lack of something essential for success for

citizenship for being in short right with the modern world And in a regime of standardization

that may indeed at least be the outcome if not the cause

(Note how socioeconomic class emerges in an envelope of phonological enregisterment

in Labovrsquos NYC work as shown in [Slides 14 amp 18] Each socioeconomic class Labov

investigated controls not one but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which

become the stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across contexts that

differentially demand production of standard Vernacular working class tense vowels show a

three-point phonological system [Iǝ]mdash[Uǝ]mdash[αǝ] a vocalic register that gradually expands in

significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of the upper middle class whose

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

18

vowel registers remain more or less the same across all the various standard-inducing tasks

Note that the lower middle class shoots past the upper middle class and ldquohypercorrectsrdquo by

adding more distinctions than the latter group make Compare the results of post-vocalic ltrgt in

our earlier [Slide 14] insofar the ldquohypercorrectrdquo frequencies of putting in post-vocalic [r] even

where orthography does not indicate one as in the stressed first syllable of ltlawyergt frequently

leaving it out at word-end in the unstressed syllable

As enregisterment is central to the work of all culture we should think as well in our state

of existence under late ndash super-ripe -- capitalism of organizations or networks of organizations

directed at this or that aspect of consumerist consumption what goes under the vernacular term

ldquolifestylerdquo (where we cannot but note the form style lurking) Think in other words of myriad

social formations with claims upon our reflexive sense of the enregisterment of our style through

our relations to commodities Think Starbuckstrade -- as we will

So can one intervene in such a regime of standardization It requires indexical

inoculation as I term it of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave Feminist

linguistic consciousness-raising among speakers of European languages Indexical inoculation

more generally as we can term it is the mechanism of spread ndash ldquocirculationrdquo of enregistered value

differentiating shibboleths [Slide 19] depends on precisely these mechanisms here the

referential ndash not semantic ndash essentialization of the epicene pronoun in a field of older standard

and non-standard] Here a positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure ndash principally

lexicon ndash intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that traditionally disprivileged

women The result is the creation of a new register so-called ldquonon-sexist languagerdquo and the

relegation of ldquosexist languagerdquo to a de-valued position at least among privileged elites in the

First World Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds of pragmatic

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

19

paradigms with second-order indexical effect lsquopro-Equityrsquo speakers and others thus always

inevitably construed as lsquoanti-Equityrsquo because of the way pragmatic or indexical oppositions

work

The new indexicality compels one as a user of language to perform onersquos political positionality

through the shibboleths of a new enregisterment of usage which were the foci of explicit ethno-

metapragmatic regimentation About 40 years ago one of the central foci in English and other

European languages was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora

as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by for example nouns of

(frequently habitual) agency and other status terms (teacher- doctor- etc) where the denotatum

is characterized in terms of social action As shown in [Slide 19] the older school-enforced

norm was to use the anaphor hehimhis (in its various case manifestations) my college- and

graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably to use theythemtheir

neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender though long condemned as non-standard and

un- or ill-educated and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive he or shehim

or herhis or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need among other strategies)

Prescriptivist standardizers we should note had cast epicene they out of standard English

and railed against it for centuries now to no avail (Anne Bodine LinS 1975) It is in fact the

only third person gender-indifferent anaphoric form in English automatically solving the

problem of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an anaphor for a

single referent genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-of-kind Thus it has been part of

the language all along though proscribed by standardizing ideology ndash that is until its

proscription was relaxed by the political generation both women and men that brought personal

style to the center of political alignment In a sense then the use of theythemthere emerged in

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

20

the 1970s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans and has become like blue jeans for our current

undergraduate students ndash which are unmarked ldquoclothesrdquo to be sure ndash it is simply the regular form

used in written as well as spoken prose He or she is the persnickety denotationally precise

form a higher register of usage voicing a kind of expository-prose precision The percentage of

uses of he as an epicene among standard using academics is now vanishingly small by Ann

Pauwelsrsquo Australian sample for instance 56 of all instances (however ten times more

frequent in menrsquos as opposed to womenrsquos usage) Having myself read some 50 lengthy

undergraduate term papers for a course on ldquoLanguage Voice and Genderrdquo in Spring Quarter

2010 I can report having found one instance of epicene he ndash in one studentrsquos paper ndash but Irsquom

sure SHE didnrsquot mean it [Slide 20] Another central focus was occupational and other status

terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum such as actor-actress-

sculptor-scultptress- where the sex characteristic coded in the feminine noun form was viewed

as an otiose excrescence and some neutral term was sought or proposed (Waitron- is my

favorite proposed in all seriousness ndash perhaps by a Star Treck fan ndash to replace the pair

waiter-waitress- but fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined

have adopted server- a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service as they have done

with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]stewardess- as men entered the main cabin precincts

of the airline industry the era of the ocean linerrsquos ldquostewardsrdquo being long over) The use of sex-

indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incumbent ndash lady plumber male nurse etc

ndash also reproduces the systematic grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary

offensive to aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity of course

Finally one of the principal concerns was terms of address in two respects The first

was based on the native speakerrsquos intuitive knowledge of the norms of usage indexing the Brown

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

21

amp Gilman (or more directly Brown amp Ford) participation framing of lsquopowerrsquo and lsquosolidarityrsquo

dimensions Here it was noted the cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from

NICKNAME to FIRST NAME to CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME (with some further possibilities in

OCCUPATIONAL STATUS TITLE + SURNAME) for example Mike or Mick gt Michael gt Mr

Silverstein (and even Dr Silverstein or Prof Silverstein) but inasmuch as there are two distinct

dimensions in the Brown amp Gilman scheme ndash lsquopowerrsquo being actually relative deference

entitlement accruing to speaker and to addressee lsquosolidarityrsquo being actually degree of (with)in-

group-ness ndash as the original authors note any single given usage is under most circumstances

indexically ambiguous The use of a nickname in addressing someone is for example generally

taken as a performance of speakerrsquos feelings of warm in-group-ness toward the addressee so

named but it may actually be a performance of the speakerrsquos estimation of addresseersquos relative

deference dis-entitlement almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to [Nota Bene]

his or her face Similarly the use of the bare first name (aka ldquogiven namerdquo ldquoChristian namerdquo)

has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning and in many contexts strikes an addressee as a

speakerrsquos faux display of an intimacy that rather is a mode of taking liberties with of

disregarding the degree of deference entitlement that the addressee considers just The classic

examples cited in much of the Feminist literature involves official personnel in professional

service encounters such as doctorrsquos or dentistrsquos office visits where patients used invariably to be

addressed by first name Hospitals and geriatric establishments are particularly demeaning of the

personal ldquodignityrdquo ie deference-entitlement of people medically afflicted of aged people etc

all tropically figurated it was objected as deferentially lesser beings in the role of addressee than

the first-naming care-providing speaker who thus speaks ex cathedra from a position as a

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

22

licensed status-superior (rather than intimate) These kinds of usage were considered to be all

the more potently demeaning to women as addressees

The second objectionable norm spanning both direct address and wider referring

involves the CIVIL TITLE + SURNAME construction Why people questioned were men denoted

by the formula Mr Smith etc notwithstanding they were unmarried or married while women

were denoted either as Miss Smith if unmarried and Mrs Smith if married (Of course

historically there was a term for young unmarried men Master Smith still in fact in use

around me on occasion when I was growing up but I suspect the civil title Master- caused

offense along the denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs slave-

So the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared in favor of a single term the one not risking

offensiveness) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denotational range of Mr

was of course Ms pronounced generally as [mIz] or [mǝz] graphically combining the first and

last alphabet letters of the two female titles The contrast with the form Miss constitutes to be

sure a new phonological minimal pair [mIs] vs [mIz] and it is here too that the indexical

innovation was most salient In fact as the wider language community grudgingly took note of

the metapragmatically inoculated indexicality it was widely the case that the innovating form

Ms replaced the earlier form Miss but was still used in opposition to Mrs To this day that is

the usage in the self-styled more prestigious of my cityrsquos newspapers the Chicago Tribune

Note the precise Kuryłowiczan Fourth Law parallel to the terms sex- and gender- noted above

unmarried women of whatever age have become Ms while married women have remained Mrs

outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-speaking populace renewing the formal

opposition as we say in historical linguistics ndash and managing to stay very narrowly within the

confines of a heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible marriage

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

23

establishing domestic reproductive and economic groupings Marital relations to be sure were

a central watershed of tension as well as concern one of a number of dimensions of identity in

which malemdashfemale status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically

located in the political economy of The West One must indeed remember that ldquothe privaterdquo is

ldquothe politicalrdquo ndash and the converse

Now as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the phenomenon of

indexical inoculation Second-Wave Feminists with reason reflexively experienced the multiple

dimensions of asymmetry of social practice in everyday life a situation in which the opposition

of male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more vs less higher vs

lower total vs part etc) and privative (yes vs no in vs out dominant vs recessive etc)

differences in a whole range of matters of sociality There were wages and salaries There were

burdens of domestic organization There were admissibility to places of power and control not

to speak of professional sports teamsrsquo locker rooms The range of institutional sites and social

domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is wide And to call attention to these asymmetries

emergent in each society as a social fact of its own local type indexical inoculation of the

denotational code constitutes a kind of ndash to use the term ndash ldquoconsciousness raisingrdquo It is through

this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of onersquos condition as a being-in-society as

having not merely ldquosexrdquo but this complex multi-dimensional socially emergent condition called

ldquogenderrdquo a condition essentially linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with

multiple other dimensions of social institutionality It is its proponents prescribed something

that all people need to come reflexively to understand about themselves in a consciousness

mobilized or ldquoraisedrdquo ndash there is the moral-ethical positioning of the matter ndash to reformist action

There is a social therapeutic goal here perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naiumlve

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

24

Whorfianism (a perduring cultural fact in The West since the Enlightenmentrsquos

instrumentalization of denotational language to find Scientific Truth and rationalize society by

rationalizing language) and of related latter-day psychotherapeutic techniques in which naming

a besetting problem is at least the first step to solving it (think of the 12-step vulgarization of

group psychotherapy cum Christian redemptive discourse)

Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound truth of this line of

Feminist thinking I concentrate on the analytic logic of the ldquobirth of lsquogenderrsquordquo in order to insist

as I did in 1985 and as Elinor Ochs did following in 1992 that in such social formations

lsquogenderrsquo is never directly indexed as a presupposable given of the social context so much as

emergent in socio-historically particular intersections of relational role-recruitments ultimately

resting on local understandings of differences of sex ndash whatever these differences involve in the

way of essentializations or naturalizations (ldquorhematizationsrdquo as we would say with Peirce [and

now Gal amp Irvine]) So the point is that from an analytic point of view to ldquoindex genderrdquo is

always already at least what we term a lsquosecond-orderrsquo phenomenon of discernable register

shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent labile and ever subject to superpositional

(Gumperz) performativity ndash ldquoacting like a manrdquo when in physical pain or ldquothrowing like a girlrdquo

in sports or ldquotelling the story like an old ladyrdquo as I was apparently heard to do by an elderly and

chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant (From whom did he think I had in fact learned how to

tell myth narratives but senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural

consultants)

What is true by contrast of the various Feminist induced transformations of cultivated

registers of standard English is something else Insofar these changes do indeed serve as

indexical inoculations people become conscious of aspects of the social order of differentiation

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

25

but as we noted in several cases including terms like Ms and the very term gender- itself the

social order has not changed merely denotational language in certain precincts of use For note

if yoursquove recently filled out a U S government form yoursquove perhaps noticed if yoursquore a

linguist the fact that information was requested as to onersquos ldquogenderrdquo with one of two boxes to

be checked ldquomalerdquo or ldquofemalerdquo At an earlier point in my life ndash for example on the certificate

registering my birth an image of which was recently sent to me by a family member ndash I would

have been classified as of the male ldquosexrdquo I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere

and in languages other than English but as a linguist I could not help but observe an example of

Kuryłowiczrsquos Fourth Law of so-called lsquoanalogyrsquo where an innovating form like a new lexeme

replaces an older one whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not restricting the

old formrsquos former field of distribution ndash indeed sometimes ousting it from the language ndash and in

effect then its meaning the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational

capacity The Kuryłowiczan chestnut in English is the form brothers ie brother- + -s a

paradigmatically regular plural with suffix -z ousting the inherited brethren as the unmarked

plural and restricting the meaning of the older form to denote aggregates of members of certain

religious corporate groups Our example gender is an entirely new lexeme prescriptively

created replacing the older form sex and being used in various sites for precisely what the older

form denoted the earlier untroubled and unproblematic binary paradigm of identifying people by

anatomical andor physiological sexuality that it was presumed was onersquos destiny ldquoGenderrdquo

so called means as a characteristic or property what sex used to (And the term sex has more or

less become tabooed or has become at least pointedly ndash as they say ndash ldquosuggestiverdquo restricted to

that realm of behavior about which one used to joke on government and similar forms that the

choice should rather be lsquoyesrsquo or lsquonorsquo than lsquomalersquo or lsquofemalersquo One now ldquohas sexrdquo only as an

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

26

experience one does not ldquohave a sexrdquo as a property in general parlance ndash except perhaps in the

phrase same-sex marriage not same gender marriage though the bearing of the compounded

term -sex here may well show the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations

Government and similar forms to fill out reflect this fact of semantic change the term sex- has

become quasi-tabooed in polite and official society and only its derivatives sexual- [cf sexual

orientation-] and sexuality- are now in wide currency)

Airlines getting passenger information when one books tickets online the train transport

corporation Amtrak and banks to whom one is applying for a home mortgage now all ask about

onersquos ldquogenderrdquo What to answer But more importantly how to understand the significance of

this linguistic change If the term gender- has in large part replaced the term sex- but the new

term has in essence the semantic (denotational) purport of the older term in such official places

Whether or not this does in fact become a leading factor in social transformation of the

realities so denoted will require some intensive sociolinguistic research for example on

otherwise demographically matched samples do people who use only or mostly the innovating

forms participate differently in the order of gender in society [A correlation to be sure but not

necessarily a cause]

I thought that in this respect the phenomenon of language replacement in Gapun village

in Papua New Guinea being followed now for some 25 years by my just departed colleague Don

Kulick demonstrates powerfully that the matter of enregisterment and the dialectic of

indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities where the two denotational codes

or languages become enregistered as alternatives with cultural meaning Note the parallel to

Bhatgaon where two generative sites of a politics of the local level can be contrasted as shown

in [Slide 21] Observe that this is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context in which

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

27

ethno-metapramatic ideology assigns one of two languages now at polar opposites in the

community to each genre for kros-es Taiap the language identified with this village even

though there are numerous other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic

exogamous in-marriage for meetings in the menrsquos house Tok Pisin the language of Christian

missionization and the language of the PNG nation-state

In Gapun the ethno-theory of communication is ADDRESSEE-focal Knowledge about

others is dangerous something to be avoided Therefore the ethic of SPEAKERHOOD is not to

impose oneself on others as ADDRESSEES and AUDIENCES to do so violates norms of proper

comportment it indexes that one has too much hed lsquoegotismrsquo (what we proper Freudians would

describe as id uncontrolled by socialization of the superego) As Kulick notes ldquo[t]he concept of

hed in Gapun signifies egoism selfishness and maverick individualism It denotes emotional

bristliness and defiant antisocial behavior and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoricrdquo

Children have lots of hed before they come to save lsquorespectfulnessrsquo through proper socialization

and ndash guess what ndash women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown

men To deliver oneself of a kros therefore an invective- and obscenity-laced response-

provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a house at others in or around other

houses is the epitome of violation of these values An individual krosed as an ADDRESSEE is

drenched saturated with unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing ndash and

loosing ndash her hed whether one wants to be so inundated or no Here [Slide 22] is Sake a proper

ldquomeri bilong krosrdquo a lsquowoman given to kros-ingrsquo letting her neighbor Erapo have it The

underlined portions actually the majority of matrix of the entextualization are in Taiap the

Papuan language properly ascribed to the village of Gapun Not everything is in Taiap but

nonetheless villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in this

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

28

plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing And importantly they

associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with displays of hed

One must always look for the sociological dimensions of peoplersquos lives in which cultural

ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a particular social formation Kulickrsquos

original fieldwork from which this report comes at the end of the rsquo80s and beginning of the rsquo90s

ndash he was back again for a year or so a couple of years ago ndash was at a time of rapid social change

Christian missionization had decidedly shifted the balance from traditional ways to ones more or

less universally superimposed on small-scale societies all over the world a kind of Christian

conceptual lens for how such societies should work In Gapun it involved heightening the

notion of the patripotestal nuclear family organized around a male head of household a menrsquos

council of such heads of households in the village meeting in the menrsquos house for collective

decision-making and so forth Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal in social

organization uterine lines of descent through women and their brothers being at the center of

political economy men taking up residence in their wivesrsquo houses When Kulick writes of the

ldquoangry women of Gapunrdquo one might say with justification that Christian missionization and its

transfer of power to the ndash Christian male ndash people ought in fact to cause anger to reveal

womenrsquos hed in the face of men having arrogated to themselves the dignity of non-mutually

interfering save in the essentially ceremonial genres of menrsquos house oratory [Slides 23 24]

So here is the second-order indexical irony in this deeply ideological ethno-

metapragmatic interpretative regime kros-ing in Taiap (whatever the mixture of actual languages

used) becomes a classic performance of femaleness by an individual ldquonaturallyrdquo prone to

burning kroses as it were while by contrast participating in menrsquos house oratory in Tok Pisin

becomes a classic performance of maleness by an individual able to engage in serial monologue

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

29

in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity Interestingly men even strategically

orchestrate or authorize kroses in which their wives or other female relatives (recalling

matrilaterality) become the talking heds as it were thus playing strategic roles in a politics that

disavows such outbursts (We might recall the talanoa)

Now given all this second-order constructionconstrual of the ideological perspective the

two contingently and historically co-occurring languages Taiap and Tok Pisin are locally seen

in a framework of the cultural absolutes of gendered ldquohuman naturerdquo Being thus rendered

intelligible the contingencies become certainties Taiap has been disappearing under indexically

effectuated devaluation along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality

Kulick reminds us ldquothat language ideologies seem never to be solely about language ndash

they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena and they encompass and are bound up

with aspects of culture like gender and expression and being lsquocivilizedrsquordquo Indeed as we see it

is language as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles even where as is

certainly the case for the modern West the focus on language seems to be denotational It never

really is

As these linguistic examples demonstrate enregisterment the spread of a register

structure in a population is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give meaning ndash

indexical meaning ndash and value to in this instance language signs transforming peoplersquos intuitions

and perceptions both of language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts ndash cohesively

arrayed material signs ndash are produced and interpreted And you donrsquot have to be a government

or para-state organization to exercise the power to enregister elements of what people come to

think of as their personal ndash even individual ndash style What is reflexively true of language in this

way is also true of every other meaningful code of culture Cultural meaning of everything in its

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

30

social context emerges in this way via enregisterment in-and-by being able to ldquodo thingsrdquo ndash

engage in consequential social action ndash with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural

stuff the fact that cultural stuff is shot through with meanings endowed by register structures

defines what the social context is and who ndash recall what social kind of person ndash is acting in that

context And language is in fact the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes

come to be enregistered language ndash discourse ndash always has the potential to give ideologically

conforming shape to the enregistered configuration of meaning and value of every other cultural

code

Think of fashion focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial objects here a

way of talking about clothes ndash what Roland Barthes called the ldquorhetoricrdquo of fashion ndash in every

form of media comprises the structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad

examples as instances of fashion come to our attention [Slide 25] (ldquoQueer Eye for the Straight

Guyrdquo [Slide 26] In food and wine in home decoration in clothing and accessories in hip

cultural activities in coiffure [Slide 27] Before [ldquoOh this is problematicrdquo] and after [ldquoWow

What a changerdquo] makeover pictures (Note that the two sartorial texts are equivalent piece-by-

piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramatically as to the coherent overall text they

comprise Best-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos how to do itrdquo] and Worst-Dressed Awards [ldquoHerersquos

how not to do itrdquo]) These folks specialize in how to fashion [] indexically coherent

enregistered texts of the self The discourse emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing social

location but one if successful that is increasingly legitimate because it declares its authoritative

status to a willing public of interlocutory others The evaluative descriptions of such fashion

discourse make salient to those increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the

visible elements of contrast of silhouette color drape weave etc in a composite outfit or

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

31

ensemble ndash ldquoDonrsquot wear brown shoes with a black beltrdquo ndash just the same way that norms of

ldquocorrectrdquo and ldquoincorrectrdquo apply to how one reads aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov

presented to people in his interviews The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct

values along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to significant difference

thus making it all the more salient

Think of comestibles like coffee So concerned have the corporate folk at Starbucks

been about the total contextualization of their products in relation to those who drink them that

they have licensed a certain persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors the baristas and other

retail faces of the corporation who insist on having would-be customers use the corporate-

specific formulaic genres in ordering their drinks when they belly up to the coffee bar Paul

Manning has written brilliantly about Starbucks barista register and its realization in the stylized

genre of the drink order Though note in this material excerpted from the corporationrsquos own

guide to ordering [Slide 28] that of course there is no ldquorightrdquo and ldquowrongrdquo way to order itrsquos just

that ldquobarista talkrdquo ie the actually preferred and normative register and constructional genre

seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such establishments And this verbal currency is

again one that constructs the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole

paradigm of complex objects of substances primary and secondary shapes sizes etc as it

purports to be the most accurate description ie construal of them Thus customersrsquo violations

of bellying up to the coffee bar with the proper formula articulated trippingly stimulate barista

rants on the corporate web site ndash here are [Slides 29 amp 30] two of my favorites ndash and

demonstrate the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the value of

the Starbucks experience but are thought by the service personnel to be distinctly unfit to

consume Starbucks liquids since they have not yet learned or ndash can you imagine ndash resist

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

32

learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for ordering them There is a sociology of

distance-from-the-authorizing-center involved no different from the distance indexed by inability

to experience and notate oinoglossic aesthetics in the act of drinking wine That sociology

distinctly reinforces what we term consumptive class the key kind of class distinction in late

capitalism the one that drives peoplersquos anxieties of identity manifest by the second-order

indexicals of verbal enregisterment insofar this indexes the conceptual framing of their approach

to consumption

But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of objects is certainly not

limited to wine and prestige- (or at least class-) conferring coffee It is everywhere and

encompasses everything in the contemporary world It is no different in sartorial self

presentation or other matters ndash especially those in on and around the body ndash where anxieties of

self-presentation can be generated

Finally let us turn to the emanation of the enregisterment of semiotic of cultural value

through the socio-spatio-temporal structures that are defined in-and-by trajectories of

communication My example starts from ndash it emanates from ndash wine and its culture in

contemporary American society My theme here is not oenological and viticultural as such it is

cultural in a more general sense using wine and its contemporary framing as exemplification of

how the essential enregisterment of culture operates in our institutionally complex

communicational environment

I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with the following swatch

or sample of what for us people with a certain wide experience of English prose is an

unmistakable textual genre [Slide 31]

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

33

First tasted in 1963 Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the mid-

1960s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb developing its characteristic hot

earthypebbly bouquet only latterly Ripe soft lovely texture but not as

demonstrably or obtrusively a rsquo61 as the other first growths Fine gentlemanly

understated

It is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note ndash in fact one of the thousands

published in 1979 by Sir Michael Broadbent (1979 xx) whose evaluations set price for

Christiersquos auction house for many years English speakers outside of the social fields where such

discourse is the norm can recognize the special quality the ldquofine gentlemanly understatedrdquo

quality of this kind of language but as is characteristic of technical and other kinds of registers

only a much smaller number can actually produce equivalent prose in the register that would

make sense to the insiders As a kind of text the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly

structured Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the dimensions of

aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or temporally structure onersquos perceptual

encounter with the obscure object of oenological desire as shown in [Slide 32] In fact analysis

of hundreds of such tasting-notes allows us to lay out in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael

had to say about Chacircteau Haut-Brion 1961 a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux on tasting

in November 1979 As in [Slide 33] we can diagram the way the very orderliness of this

ldquospontaneousrdquo bit of English prose in fact follows its rigid structural pattern

What I have done in this diagram is to separate on the right the phrases composed of the

technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along which they evaluate the

substance For example under stage II nose Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy

and initially difficult to discern (ldquodumbrdquo) but later was reassured to experience the ldquohot

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

34

earthypebblyrdquo-ness of the bouquet component of scent the one presumed to come from the

techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and cabernet sauvignon) There are

what we term taxonomies of characteristics for each dimension among the members of which a

taster distinguishes A maximal note records values along all five dimensions in their proper

order a more telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III for which there are

the most taxonomic differentiators and perhaps as well stage II

Here are a couple of examples that came onto my desktop screen the other year [Slide

34] for Girardinrsquos 2007 Puligny Montrachet Folatiegraveres The text genre and especially the

register are unmistakable We can render these two recent exemplars by metrical analysis that

reveals how they track the stages of aesthetic encounter Notice here [Slide 35] in The Wine

Advocatersquos tasting note how remarkably active and agentive how almost like an encountered

animate subject-Alter the aesthetic essence comes to be of what is after all mere chemical

substance The wine-as-aesthetic-essence ldquominglesrdquo (active nomic) it is ldquovivaciousrdquo and

ldquobrightrdquo in its brimming-ness it ldquofinishes with almost startling grip and tenacityrdquo and it

ldquocompensates forrdquo what it seems to lack in the way of complexity But it presents itself as it

were phase by phase as an aesthetic construction of experienced qualia first in the aroma

dimension ldquomalt and toasted briocherdquo giving way to ldquosea breeze fresh citrus ripe white peach

floral perfumesrdquo Next in the mouth it tastes of ldquoprimary fruitrdquo and feels ndash its texture ndash ldquosilkenrdquo

on the tongue And as it vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated it still seems to be there

its finish in other words ldquotenaciousrdquo in fact ldquostartlinglyrdquo so Itrsquos an in-your-face wine not a

subtle one full of ldquosheer energy and excitementrdquo that makes up for lack ndash can you imagine after

all this verbiage ndash of ldquocomplexityrdquo The shorter note by Stephen Tanzer too [Slide 36]

constructs an aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described in

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

35

the rightmost column of my chart so pleasurable an aesthetic object apparently as to render

itself ldquolovelyhelliphigh-pitchedhellipvibranthellip [and] seriously sexyrdquo One blushes to think of the even

metaphorical tingling bodily reaction of the taster and yet here we see illustrated the important

notion that the event of tasting is an encounter with a structure of qualia ndash here rendered into a

verbal report ndash to which the sensitive indeed here the hypersensitive aesthete responds with

unmistakable affect even emotion even as being able to cognize to verbalize the experience If

truly authoritative ndash think here of Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker of The Wine

Advocate eagerly sought out by aficionados ndash these notes become normative standards for other

tasters to share the experience indeed to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it in the

same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multi-dimensional elaboration of a structure

of qualia as the wine authorities The tasting note becomes a verbal component of a normative

cultural schema with respect to the object of aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment normatively

constructing that aesthetic object as it purports to construe to interpret it

Now what is interesting about wine talk is certainly not the register phenomenon as such

but the curious bidirectional and tiered dialectical indexical character ndash I like to call it

appropriately enough for wine Eucharistic ndash of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse

[Slide 37] For if as wersquove seen it is the case that one is engaged in an activity of construal of

the aesthetic object interpreting it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the

discerning taster in a canonically conforming tasting note using the canonically conforming

register one is in-and-by this act of construal at the same time performatively constructing

oneself not only the aesthetic object in effect placing or locating oneself socially in respect of a

ldquocommunity of practicerdquo those ldquoin-the-knowrdquo about matters oenological

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

36

To be sure all manifestations of so-called expert knowledge inevitably suggests both In

the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of professional or avocational

connoisseurship Expert discourse is denotationally terminologized and genred its lexical forms

ndash its set words and expressions ndash as wersquove already seen index points of conceptual distinction in

the normative ontologies of such expertise in how the world is structured and one must use the

words and expressions just so in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse

coherently to communicate all the conceptualized dimensionalities of the object of denotation

and how they interrelate in the expert ontological perspective Thus thinking and talking like ndash

or in varying modes of fault unlike ndash an expert indexically positions an individual with respect

to social identifiability as an aesthete of viniferous experience [Slide 38] associating the

individual with the societal places where experts ply their trade as it were and endow such an

individualrsquos views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of expertise here

gustatory aesthetics where one ldquogetsrdquo art one does not merely gulp it down

Now in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of evaluative

connoisseurship there are other bits of prose as I have separated to the left of the textual

diagram These tend to be characterological almost anthropomorphic and bespeak by their use

a kind of assumed social position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied

precints of male clubby culture in the city and on weekends with great estates and country clubs

of tony suburbia and exurbia My research reveals however that it is these vocabulary and

phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits actually identify as the

verbal register of ldquowine talkrdquo and about which there is the usual kind of class-associated anxiety

peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie ndash as is the case for many realms of connoisseurship

[Slide 39] Perhaps you have seen the famous 1944 New Yorker drawing by James Thurber with a

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

37

caption quoting a dinner party host as he tastes the wine he has served noting for his

disconcerted guests ldquoItrsquos a naiumlve domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you will

be amused by its presumptionrdquo All of this talk is characterological phraseology all stuff from

the left-side of the diagram but richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious

readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurberrsquos joke still resonates

Now as an anthropologist I am concerned with how in modern life people approach

commodities such as edibles and potables as a function of such normative cultural schemes that

direct their perception of the qualities culture makes salient qualities by which they classify

categorize and come to judge the good from the bad ndash not only the things they ingest but as well

those they wear drive or make use of in other ways in their daily lives

As a linguist I am further concerned with the meanings of words and expressions by

which people communicate with one another In such communication even the same word-form

can be associated with many different conceptual schemes depending on socially recognized

expertise think of what we term the ldquotechnical meaningsrdquo of otherwise ordinary words like

lattice or bouquet and contrastively think of words known only among those with certain

ldquotechnical knowledgerdquo such as muon or climat

In effect then using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of communication

frequently does double classificatory work A word used in a certain descriptive way categorizes

or classifies both things-in-the-denotable-world (whether ldquorealrdquo or fictiveimagined) to be sure

it indexes a schema of qualia (see now Chumley and Harkness 2013) But additionally the

particular differential application of the word at the same time reveals ndash it points to or indexes ndash

the social identity the category of person who would stereotypically invoke such a use of the

word This is an example of what we term the ldquoregister effectrdquo of such linguistic variety (which

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

38

is by the way universal in all known language communities) In what follows I will return

several times to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the nonverbal semiotics

that mediate classifications of things and persons for the strength and institutional entrenchment

of such a lexical register effect along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to

understanding the observable spread or emanation of wine-talk or ldquooinoglossiardquo as I have

dubbed it

My point is that wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-developed register effect

not only in language but in a large number of penumbral sign systems that frame the production

circulation consumption and memorialization of this substance and peoplersquos relation to it And

this register effect is spreading or has been spreading from the domain ndash the domaine if you

will ndash of the oenological to draw in any comestible that aspires to distinction that is that aspires

at the same time to confer distinction upon its consumer In terms of the framing of myriad other

comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige a kind of semiotic ldquovinificationrdquo ndash

turning them into metaphorical wine ndash has been taking place both in the language surrounding

them and in the other sign systems by which we make their virtues known for example in the

visual codes of advertising

In other words the institutional world of wine has become a centerpoint of ldquoemanationrdquo

of ways of constructing prestige throughout a whole world of construable comestibles edible and

potable commodities that are brought into the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a

social life So today just as one can be admiredreviled imitatedshunned for being a ldquowine

snobrdquo (a folk term of opprobrioiusness from outside the fold) so also can one find a parallel

place in the universe of experiencers of coffee beer cheese ice cream olive oil vodka etc ndash

examples in my data of all those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

39

culture Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers the register effect of

bidirectional thingmdashhuman co-categorization to any such commodity now claiming the

possibility of stratified prestige We will see that we are ndash sociologically speaking ndash what we

communicate about what we eat or drink

Wine is as it were an agricultural product with the potential to be rendered into potable

art and thus is stratified as a commodity from the low or vulgar registers ndash think of

Thunderbirdtrade ndash to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only through knowledgeable

connoisseurship articulated through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience like

any art form such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the more easterly and

westerly vineyards of a particular yearrsquos La Tacircche or Cocircte Rocirctie Setting the growing and

vinification of grapes aside the central events of value-setting in the aesthetic appreciation of

wine are centered on consuming wine and communicating ndash talking ndash about the consumption

experience Hence we can understand what lies behind the splendid cartoon by the New Yorker

magazinersquos satirist of the WASP Upper East Side of Manhattan William Hamilton reproduced

here in [Slide 38] One ldquodrinksrdquo mere beverages one ldquogetsrdquo great art

ldquoGettingrdquo great art and being able to distinguish it from not-so-great art requires the

practiced aesthetic talents of a connoisseur the more subtle the aesthetic faculties the more

exquisitely near sublimity the experience the more rewarding the investment as it were of the

aesthetic inclination and training A perhaps even daily occasion for the ordinary wine-drinker

an interaction with the art object is thus implicitly infused with meanings and values that

intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of knowledge using the

discourse and other semiotics of wine lies at the intersection of three great macro-institutions of

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

40

our society the interaction of which shapes the communicational networks determining how we

think and talk about wine

One such institutional force is that of applied science in particular oenological and

viticultural sciences such as soil science botany organic chemistry and human

psychophysiology A second is aesthetic connoisseurship in the world of collecting auctions

ldquocapital appreciationrdquo as it were ranging from the professional through the serious avocational

to the rank amateur or even happenstance wine-drinker A third is retail marketing of

commodity circulation of so-called ldquolife stylerdquo commodities ie personal-value-conferring

commodities of domestic consumption in which ldquobrandrdquo for example has become so important

as an index of distinction Each of these institutional sources endows the wine consumerrsquos

reflective engagement with a distinctive register effect that my materials show has been

spreading from wine to other comestibles

First from the applied science institution emanates the notion that we respond

psychophysically to the ldquoraw datardquo of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated

dimensionalized numerically measured and then terminologically standardized by laboratory

methods defining an orderly perceptual space within which the sensorium operates This would

do for the phases of wine perception outlined in [Slide 32] much the same as has been achieved

in other areas of sensory perception note pitch loudness and harmonic overtone structure for

sound (related to the physical wave frequency amplitude and dispersion of acoustic energy in a

signal) or the perceptual space of huemdashsaturationmdashbrightness for lsquocolorrsquo characteristics of light

in the visible spectrum A particularly interesting and influential example of the analogical

transfer is the ldquostandard system of wine aroma terminologyrdquo from the University of California

Davis School of Viticulture and Oenology as shown in [Slide 40] It is of course just a three-

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

41

node taxonomy of kinds of aromas each pie-shaped area is really a set of paths from the

centerpoint essentially undifferentiated aroma to more and more specific kinds Particularly in

an environment of a consuming bourgeoisie trained and credentialed for their very livelihoods

used to thinking in terms of a psychophysics of the reactive self the idea that one can achieve

degrees of dimensionalized precision like this in onersquos wine connoisseurship as a kind of applied

science is of course very natural and appealing

And being so appealing seeming to give a rock-solid empirical basis in laboratory

chemistry to terms of aesthetic connoisseurship the aroma taxonomy has spawned many

repetitions and imitations first via admiring circulation by wine critics in newspapers in

magazines and on websites [Slide 41] shows Professor Noble et alrsquos ldquoaroma wheelrdquo

reproduced ndash interdiscursively aligned with ndash by Patrick Fegan in his syndicated wine column

[Slide 42] by Ronn Wiegand in the aficionado magazine Wine amp Spirits February 1994 spreads

to the rice-derived wine sake the concept of a differential taxonomy of descriptors displayed in

wheel form At a slightly later period as micro-breweries were coming definitively into the

consumer consciousness note an imitation wheel ndash combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a

single circular display ndash even for beer in [Slide 43] bringing this drink (and its consuming

public) formerly culturally opposed to wine into the aesthetic fold

For indeed the second broadly institutionalized realm intersected in oenophily is to be

sure aesthetic connoisseurship and the ldquocommunities of practicerdquo it engages around any

particular focus of attention organizing at least in part onersquos style of life The analogue is of

course art connoisseurship (as made clear in William Hamiltonrsquos cartoon in [Slide 38]) There

are professional connoisseurs who set price in the art market and these people are valued for the

subtlety of their judgment in discerning and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

42

and other avocational enthusiasts who are at the same time investors in a commodity that

accrues monetary value in the market Just as there are published The Wine Spectator and The

Wine Advocate and according to the Googletrade search engine as of July 2013 14800000 sites

accessible through the expression ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 1130000000 through the expression

ldquowine termsrdquo16 so also do we now have The Beer Advocate The Malt [ie (scotch) whiskey]

Advocate The Cheese Advocate etc both in print and online The imitative parallelism ndash how

these forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine ndash is extraordinary

The third macro-institution is life-style retailing which relies on the existence of the first

two What you are in consumption class is what you eat drink wear etc ndash and what you

consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience In such retailing a product

that can be a performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individuation of an

artisanal experience and the repetition of brand dependability of course Total individuation in

wine gets down to the level of the individual bottle the best oenological connoisseurs facing the

most rarefied of wines operate at this level (Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness

informs the practice at serving of never filling a glass with bottle number two if there is still

present in the glass some of wine of bottle number one for example Even where it is ridiculous

1 An earlier Googletrade search done almost four years earlier on 1 October 2009 yielded 422000

sites keyed by ldquowine appreciationrdquo and 25300000 by ldquowine termsrdquo giving some sense of either

the phenomenal growth of online information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to

the trendy newer media or of the efficiency of the search engine or some combination of both

7For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of ldquobrandrdquo see Moore 2003 Manning 2010 and

Nakassis 2012 the latter in particular worrying the ldquocitationalrdquo (Nakassis 2013) nature of

branded commodities

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

43

not to do so it is an indexically pregnant gesture of interdiscursive reference to the top-and-

center of viticultural distinction) At the other extreme it is brand brand brand that is the

principle of marketing like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the products

themselves7 At the middle ranges of the wine market in the United Sates brandedness is the key

to marketing the consumer must be made to feel the equivalent ndash for wine certainly anchored in

France and French ndash of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the body or a

Miegravele dish-washer in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen In this light look at the clever Clos du

Bois ad in [Slide 44] which summoning to consciousness what we might term the wine brandrsquos

ldquoFrenchnessrdquo of which a host serving it to guests can be proud notwithstanding emphasizes its ndash

surprise ndash Californian provenance

The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceedingly high register

effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connoisseurs) is in fact coming to define what a

prestige comestible is [Slide 45] Early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon for example the

company circulated a ldquotake onerdquo newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rarefied

purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks As can be seen in [Slide 46] the prose of

these informative ndash indeed educational ndash materials takes the genred form of wine tasting notes

ldquoSeductiverdquo Ethiopian Sidamo has ldquoflowery bouquet (with a hint of eucalyptus) light and

elegant body and a honeyed natural sweetnessrdquo Harrarrsquos ldquoChiantiesque slightly gamy aromardquo

gives it ldquoa certain rustic charmrdquo as ldquoa coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of

subtletyrdquo And speaking of subtlety what could be less subtle in analogical form as revealed in

[Slide 47] than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement for Colombian coffee ndash a coffee

varietal that is we should surely appreciate from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

44

picture akin to wine itself in its most characteristically French denomination an AOC

ldquoAppellation drsquoOrigine Controcircleacuteerdquo

Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia wine-talk some literally Here

in [Slide 48] is the wrapper of one of Lindtrsquos chocolate bars It teaches the consumer that

chocolate must be aesthetically perceived just like wine through stages of apperceptive

evaluation ndash sight break-feel aroma taste aftertaste ndash in which of course this brand will be

seen to be the best

As we can see from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of the prestige

economy of aesthetic comestibles people and things linked therein in which all the signs from

language on out are deeply enmeshed in register effects that construct both the comestible and at

the same time the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing ndash like good vines

And even beyond humans [Slide 49] is an image of the impeccable taste appropriately enough

imagined to be enregistered by the noble king of beasts

Finally it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping semioticization

have a temporality such that what is happening at the institutional center of emanation may be

already shifting just as its influence is being felt elsewhere in social spacetime Thus on 9

September 2009 the New York Timesrsquos wine critic Eric Asimov wrote about the populist

proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk

proprietor of ldquoThe Wine Libraryrdquo (formerly Shopperrsquos Discount Liquor in Springfield New

Jersey a couple of miles west of the Newark Airport) As revealed in [Slide 50] Everyman ndash to

use the medieval generic name ndash is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur in the illustrative

photo-shoot open-shirted tieless expressive-faced perhaps visibly ethnic tasting wine in the

upstairs storeroom You Everyman can borrow taste from The Wine Library And on the very

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

45

same day Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about ldquotea sommeliersrdquo tea tasting

ritual stylistically vinified tea merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual and the

emergence of regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the

American Tea Masters Association a self-proclaimed certifying board Observe the dress the

comportment the demeanor exemplified in [Slide 51] is that emanation of enregisterment ndash

verbal sartorial of demeanor etc or what

The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple at the circumference of the circular

undulations created where the stone is first dropped in ndash perhaps to mix the metaphor leaving us

with an ironic aftertaste

Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations emanations proceed

simultaneously from many competing centers of regimentation indeed they must operate in a

socio-spatio-temporality somewhat slower and more scale-encompassing than mere

interdiscursivity as such mere circulation which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of

emanation

So there you have it whatever one might want to call lsquoculturalrsquo manifests in this trimodal

semiotic As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of them but always find that we must

take account of the other two in order really to locate to find ldquoculturerdquo Phenomenally and

epistemologically semiotic signification emerges in the first instance in events of discursive

interaction though as wersquove seen to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least

understanding the interdiscursivities of circulation Circulation as such encompasses a social

organization of communication frequently and especially as institutionalized across structural

sites that are implicitly referenced ndash in renvoi and in prolepsis ndash in some particular site we seek

to understand and interpret And finally emanation defines an overall structure of tiered nodes in

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

46

a network of sites of practice generative centers of semiosis and paths to their peripheries In or

through such emergent structures semiotic value via genres of textuality ever of the moment

flows and intersects that coming from other generative centers such that complex cultural forms

as experienced are inevitably multiply determined from several such centers of emanation Wine

and its oinoglossic registers of verbal visual etc semiosis seem socio-historically to have

crystallized at such an intersection as we have seen and we have caught it as it in turn has

seemed to emerge as a relatively autonomous center of emanation semiotically informing the

more general stratification of consumption

We have been talking about matters such as lsquocultural valuesrsquo and the ideology concept

locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social structure and social organization the

static ldquoanatomyrdquo of social formations and the processual event-bound ldquophysiologyrdquo of them

The reflexive focus of lsquolanguage or linguistic ideologyrsquo on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use

of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific concepts of not only

language but of the universes of experience and imagination may emerge Linguistics focused

on denotational structure ndash remember how we represent by-degrees lsquotruthfulrsquo propositions about

referents and other denotata ndash has been strongly ldquouniversalistrdquo and rather unconcerned with

possibilities of socioculturally local conceptual schemata So I want in the last few class sessions

to introduce the disjunction between strictly grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic

concepts coded in linguistic form which wersquove grown to presume upon in formal study of

language and what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and function of

language In my reading Benjamin Lee Whorf that exemplar of integrating the precision of

Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures

47

cognition was one of the first to come to understand the distinction so we will lay out issues of

the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with his work

So next time I want to develop the concept of the denotational domain mostly implicit

in but completely necessary to comparingcontrastingldquocalibratingrdquo (to use Whorfrsquos term)

language structures