Bourdieu, language and linguistics

268 Pages·2011·1.333 MB·English

by  Michael Grenfell

Bourdieu, Language and Linguistics
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Bourdieu, Language and
Linguistics
By
Michael Grenfell
with contributions from
Adrian Blackledge, Cheryl Hardy,
Stephen May, and Robert Vann
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Michael James Grenfell, and contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-8470-6569-8 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bourdieu, language and linguistics / [editor] Michael James Grenfell.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-8470-6569-8 (hardcover)
1. Language and culture. 2. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930–2002. 3. Sociolinguistics. I. Grenfell,
Michael, 1953– II. Title.
P35.B625 2010
306.44–dc22 2010008974

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Michael Grenfell
Part I: Theory
Chapter 2: Bourdieu: A Theory of Practice 7
Michael Grenfell
Chapter 3: Bourdieu, Language and Linguistics 35
Michael Grenfell
Part II: Practice
Chapter 4: Language Variation 67
Michael Grenfell

Chapter 5: Language and Ideology 97
Robert E. Vann
Chapter 6: Linguistic Ethnography 121
Adrian Blackledge
Chapter 7: Language Policy 147
Stephen May
Chapter 8: Language and Education 170
Cheryl Hardy
vi Contents
Part III: Towards a Science of Language and Linguistic Study
Chapter 9: Towards a Science of Language and Linguistic Study 197
Michael Grenfell
Chapter 10: Conclusion 226
Bibliography 232
Contributors 249
Index 251
List of Illustrations
Tables
4.1 Counts of elisions and liaisons/1,000 words together
with elision/liaison ratio set out according to S(O+E)C,
age, gender and profession 76
4.2 Topic/anti-topic ratio according to S(O+E)C 80
4.3 Number of fi ller phrases/1,000 words according to S(O+E)C 81
4.4 Response to sociolinguistic questionnaire according to
socio-economic groupings 84
5.1 Correlations, 1-tailed signifi cance T-test 112
5.2 Independent variables in the multiple regression on
innovative practice 112
5.3 Correlations, 1-tailed signifi cance T-test 113
5.4 Independent variables in the multiple regression on ideology 113
8.1 Habitus constituents of participants 186

Graph
4.1 Number of elisions and liaisons/1,000 words 77
Figures
5.1 Percent of innovative usage as a function of relative exposure
to Catalan and Spanish 110
5.2 Effect of relative exposure to Catalan and Spanish on ideology 114
Acknowledgements
The idea for this book grew out of a symposium organized by the Linguistic
Ethnography Forum, a special interest group of the British Association of
Applied Linguistics. I would like to acknowledge the input of the members
of this Forum and their encouragement to undertake this project. In
particular, I thank Brian Street of Kings College, London, and Adrian
Blackledge from University of Birmingham for their discussion and sup-
port. The book began life as a joint project between Adrian and I. Although
he later had to drop out from steering the project through to completion,
I appreciate the work he did, especially at the initial, planning stages of
the book.
Some 8 years after his death, I still feel a need to acknowledge Pierre
Bourdieu for the time and support he afforded me over a number of years.
We discussed issues of language and linguistics at length together during
our meetings, and he also gave me invaluable feedback on my corpus study
work from Orléans. I remember him as a friend and mentor who offered
an example to us all, and as one who still guides my own endeavours to
actualize a refl exive science.
I acknowledge with gratitude and respect the individual contributors,
who worked on the practical chapters of the book: Adrian Blackledge,
Cheryl Hardy, Stephen May, Robert Vann.

Special thanks to Cheryl Hardy for input and feedback way beyond her
own individual contribution.
Finally, I acknowledge the patience and interest extended to me by my
colleagues at Trinity College, Dublin, while I was preoccupied with work on
the book, especially, Andrew Loxley, Paula McDonagh, Carmel O’Sullivan,
Adrian Seery and Michael Shevlin.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Michael Grenfell
Since the death of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in 2002, it seems
that his infl uence has continued to grow unabated. Born of ‘peasant stock’
in 1930, Bourdieu’s academic trajectory took him from local boarding
school to the highest echelons of the Parisian intellectual world. Perhaps
last of the old-style philosophes, his work is now studied and his name cited
alongside those other twentieth-century giants of the French thought: De
Beauvoir, Sartre, Derrida and Foucault. His output was both enormous and
extensive, including many hundreds of books, articles and talks on a wide
range of subjects, from philosophy to the French fashion industry. It is now
commonplace to see Bourdieu’s ideas adopted in such academic fi elds
as education, economics, the media, philosophy, culture, art and music,
management, gender studies, literature, sport, photography, religion and
politics – among others.
Although I have described Bourdieu as a ‘sociologist’, his was a special
kind of sociology, one that was founded on a central European philosophical
tradition; and Bourdieu was heavily infl uenced by such philosophers as
Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Husserl and Nietzsche, albeit that this infl uence
was often as much thinking against them as with them. His mentors
also included Fren ch philosophers, for example, the phenomenologist
Merleau-Ponty, and philosophers of the history of science such as Bachelard,
Canguilhem and Koyré. Besides these philosophical roots, Bourdieu’s brand
of sociology was constructed through a synthesis of the founding fathers
of the discipline: Comte, Marx, Weber and Durkheim. He also embraced
anthropology at an early stage in his career, mostly noticeably through the
work of Claude Lévi-Srauss. Bourdieu’s sociology was therefore very much
a ‘social philosophy’, and one that continually confronted issues of fact
and value in exploring the limits of science and truth. Of course, ‘language’
was a central concern for many of the writers cited above. However, up until
now, and somewhat curiously, Bourdieu has been generally overlooked by