Selves in Two Languages: Bilinguals' verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese (Studies in Bilingualism, Volume 34)

Selves in Two Languages

Studies in Bilingualism (SiBil) The focus of this series is on psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. This entails topics such as childhood bilingualism, psychological models of bilingual language users, language contact and bilingualism, maintenance and shift of minority languages, and sociopolitical aspects of bilingualism.

Editors Kees de Bot

University of Groningen

Thom Huebner

San José State University

Editorial Board Michael Clyne

University of Melbourne

Kathryn A. Davis

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Joshua A. Fishman Yeshiva University

Francois Grosjean

Université de Neuchâtel

Wolfgang Klein

Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik

Georges Luedi

University of Basel

Christina Bratt Paulston University of Pittsburgh

Suzanne Romaine

Merton College, Oxford

Merrill Swain

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

G. Richard Tucker

Carnegie Mellon University

Volume 34 Selves in Two Languages: Bilinguals’ verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese Michèle Koven

Selves in Two Languages Bilinguals’ verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese

Michèle Koven University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koven, Michèle. Selves in two languages : Bilinguals’ verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese / Michèle Koven. p. cm. (Studies in Bilingualism, issn 0928-1533 ; v. 34) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bilingualism--Psychological aspects. 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. French language-Social aspects. 4. Portuguese language--Social aspects. I. Title. P115.4.K68    2007 440'.4269--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 4145 0 (Hb; alk. paper)

2007026892

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Transcription Conventions

ix

Part I: Theoretical and Ethnographic Context 1.

Introduction

1

2.

Discourse-Semiotic Approaches to Bilingual Selfhood

11

3.

Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Contexts of Luso-descendants in France and Portugal

37

Part II: Bilinguals’ Identity Performance 4.

5.

6.

7.

Bilinguals’ Reflections about the Impact of Two Languages on Context and Self

61

Enacting Bilingual Selves in Narrative: Narrative Elicitation and Analytic Framework

87

Enacting Bilingual Selves in Narrative: Results of Narrative Analysis of Voicing

115

Listeners’ Perceptions of Bilinguals in Each Language

149

Part III: Individual Speaker Profiles 8.

Teresa

177

9.

Isabel

209

vi SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

10. Conclusion

237

References

251

Appendix A: Description of Entry into Field and Field Sites

283

Appendix B: Participants’ Backgrounds

285

Appendix C: Coded Transcripts of Teresa’s Story Pair

293

Appendix D: Teresa’s Overall Profile

305

Appendix E: Coded Transcripts of Isabel’s Story Pair

309

Appendix F: Isabel’s Overall Profile

317

Index

321

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Aneta Pavlenko, Meredith Doran, Ingrid Piller, Peggy Miller, Daena Goldsmith, Andrea Golato, Elizabeth Martin, Adrienne Lo, Michael Silverstein, Susan Goldin-Meadow, John Lucy, Nadine Di Vito, Bert Cohler, Jorge de La Barre, Roselyne de Villanova, Geneviève Vermès, Pierre Encrevé, Michel de Fornel, Albano Cordeiro, Elsa Lechner, Brian Fields, Rob Moore, Cécile Denier, Cara Finnegan, Judith Irvine, Bambi Schieffelin, Karen Weller-Watson, Bonnie Hanks, and Debra Brown for helpful feedback and support at various stages of this project’s development. I am also very grateful to Dale Brashers and David Tewksbury for answering statistical questions. My gratitude also goes to Sarah Pouzet, Pedro Correia, Olinda Braga de Souza, Simone Da Silva, Emmanuelle Gira, Catherine Vignon, Jérémie de Cointet de Fillain, and Saulo Gouveia for their help with coding and transcription. Great appreciation goes to the many Luso-descendants who made this work possible. Finally, thanks to Joan Koven, Ronald Koven, and Martine Koven, with whom I first became interested in how bilinguals “change skins” as they change languages. All remaining errors are my own. This research was supported by a Châteaubriand fellowship from the French Government, an exchange between the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of Chicago, by a grant from the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS Transcriptions are rendered with differing levels of detail, depending on the purpose for which they are shown. Below is a list of conventions used. . . . intervening material has been omitted (.) brief pause (h) laughter or breathiness (()) transcriber comment [ speaker overlap = contiguous utterances , utterance signaling more to come . utterance final intonation : lengthening of preceding sound ALL CAPS emphasis ↑ rising intonation ↓ falling intonation

PART I THEORETICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Bilinguals commonly observe that they are a “different person” in each of their two languages. For example, a young bilingual woman raised in France, the daughter of Portuguese migrants, reported to me about herself, “When I speak Portuguese . . . I have trouble recognizing myself . . . I have the impression of being another person.” Another young bilingual woman explained, “I feel like that when I speak Portuguese, automatically, I’m in a different world . . . it’s a different color.” Another said, “Changing languages, even if you’re in the same place, you always feel like everything changes around you.” This book investigates French-Portuguese bilingual women’s experiences of the relation between their languages and their identities, and it ultimately seeks to account for bilinguals’ multiple experiences of self in and through language. Although the specific subjective experiences bilinguals associate with their different languages are always informed by their local sociolinguistic contexts, the phenomenon of feeling “like a different person” across languages is not unique to French-Portuguese bilinguals. It has been explored across a number of disciplines, for and by different types of bilinguals. Bilingual memoirists have discussed the sense that they are not the same in their different languages. Psychotherapists have talked about the challenges of working with bilingual clients, who seem to display a different “sense of self” in their two languages. Experimentalists have also noted the different quality of bilinguals’ “personalities” and emotional experiences in their two languages.1 Within the context of a methodologically innovative, empirical study, this book provides a theoretical account for the relationships between French-Portuguese bilinguals’ language(s) and “selves.” I explore how and why these bilinguals, the transnationally mobile daughters of Portuguese migrants living in France, could feel that they are a different person in their two languages. I approach this question with a set of discourse-centered approaches to explore how social actors use semiotic resources within and across their languages to enact and experience their multiple identities. Ultimately, the study of how these bilinguals come to perform and experience different identities in their two languages sheds light on the more general role of linguistic and cultural forms in local experiences and expressions of identity.

2 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Bilinguals’ Experiences Challenge Assumptions about Language and Self Exploring bilinguals’ experiences of self and language compels one to interrogate assumptions of normative monolingualism/monoculturalism in research on the cultural construction of subjective experiences, as well as assumptions about the relationship between language and self more generally. Monolingual/Monocultural Assumptions in Research on Cultural Construction of Self Scholarship on the cultural construction of personhood has often compared the contexts and meanings of selfhood in single populations, frequently as if each culture were a unified whole, with one major idiom in which to display self and feeling. Much that has been written about the cultural construction of self (Geertz 1983; Lutz 1988a; Markus and Kitayama 1991; Rosaldo 1980; Shweder and Bourne 1982) has maintained a monolingual perspective, presenting the contexts researched as monocultural and monolingual. Implicit is the folk belief in a one-to-one correspondence of person, language, and culture, where people are assumed to have been socialized to display and embody the “self” of a single language and culture. In most contemporary, complex societies, however, there is no such straightforward one-to-one correspondence of person, culture, and language (Hymes 1967; Irvine 1996a). This is particularly apparent for multilinguals, who from childhood onward may have routinely functioned with two or more sets of linguistic and cultural norms. Bilinguals’ displays and experiences of selfhood have received relatively little attention. How to address the impact of bilingualism on speakers’ expressions and experiences of self and feeling? Indeed, from a perspective that assumes sociolinguistic diversity as the norm, one would expect to find a range of available ways of speaking and contexts within communities, through which people may perform different styles of self and affect (Abu-Lughod 1986; Irvine 1990). One can then compare not only how monolinguals from different languages and cultures perform and experience themselves, but also how the same social actor displays and experiences herself differently across her multiple ways of speaking, within and/or across languages. By examining the consequences of different ways of speaking for the display and experience of self and feeling, this approach becomes a way to reengage what Lucy (1992, 1997) and Hymes (1966) have called functional or discursive relativity. With this perspective, this book examines systematically how the same speakers experience and display different personas across their two languages.

INTRODUCTION 3

Assumptions about the Relation between Language and Self Bilinguals’ reported experiences of feeling different in their two languages are intriguing because they challenge many of our entrenched folk beliefs about the relationship of language, context, and personhood—beliefs that posit “the self” as stable, coherent, acontextual, and internal. In European and North American repertoires of beliefs about personhood, such views persist and circulate in everyday and scholarly discourse. They appear in anthropological accounts of the “western” idea of self, “as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe . . . organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.” (Geertz 1983:59). They are also echoed in psychological theories about the universal human need to find continuity and coherence across contexts (Erikson 1980; Schafer 1980, 1981, 1983, 1992; Spence 1982). When treated as folk beliefs, these notions of self form the ideological backdrop against which the experience of having “multiple selves” could seem perplexing. Remarking on such folk beliefs, Crapanzano notes, “The embarrassment . . . we (Americans and Europeans) feel when we discover changes in our voice and stance reflects our obsessive concern with the self, with its singularity, its constancy, its coherence, and our apperception of its fragility, and artifice” (1992:10-11). Similarly, Taylor (1989) describes the modern western belief in the self’s essential inwardness. We often strive to locate “the self” as “being independent of webs of interlocution” (36), where the self should be able to overcome its connectedness to others, being most fully itself when alone. This romantic notion of self assumes an inner, “true” voice, where speech only makes manifest an essential self, which already exists prior to it. Multilinguals’ language-based experiences and displays of self do not fit with such folk beliefs that see (any) language as external to and merely describing a fully constituted “core” self that is stable across contexts. If one believes that identity is fully realized before speaking in any language, the idea that people talk, come across, and experience themselves differently across linguistic contexts may seem bizarre. Bilinguals’ experiences thus challenge beliefs that “identity” exists prior to and is transparently reflected in speech, rather than at least partially emergent from it. Self as Emergent From Discourse Such pervasive folk beliefs notwithstanding, how then to account for the experiences of bilinguals who report feeling like a “different person” in their two languages? The relationship between language and self I adopt is that “selves,” as performed and experienced, take on their social and psychological reality through language(s), as Voloshinov articulates.

4 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

The speaking personality, its subjective designs and intentions, and its conscious stylistic stratagems do not exist outside their material objectification in language. Without a way of revealing itself in language, be it only in inner speech, personality does not exist for itself or for others . . . Language lights up the inner personality and its consciousness; language creates them and endows them with intricacy and profundity—and it does not work the other way. Personality itself is generated through language. (Voloshinov 1973: 152-153)

In this way, the self is not prior to or independent of language, but rather self and language are fully interlinked. From this perspective, I will argue that in order to fully explore the cultural and discursive constructions of bilingual selfhood, one should not look for “selves” as essences that underlie or preexist interaction, but should attend closely to real-time discursive interactions in which participants “selves” are enacted and inferred (Agha 1995; Besnier 1994a; Crapanzano 1992; Rosenberg 1990; Wortham 2001). This understanding of the relation between selfhood and language is therefore pre-psychological, following Crapanzano (1990, 1992). That is, I do not assume that the self is an underlying, psychological entity, what Crapanzano refers to as “an empiricist view of the self, as existing independently of its linguistic description” (1990: 404), which a bilingual’s two languages then merely reflect. Instead, “selves” are inextricably embedded in and emergent from the pragmatics of discursive interaction. Multiple Identities in Discourse If identity is grounded in discursive context, it follows that any individual enacts, is ascribed, and experiences multiple identities, associated in complex ways with the multiple contexts in which he/she participates. Indeed the notion that individuals have multiple identities has come to be generally accepted among psychological anthropologists (Ewing 1990, 1998; Rosenberg 1997; Sokefeld 1999), social psychologists (Camilleri 1997; Davies and Harré; Gergen 1994; Goffman 1959; Harré 1996), linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Bailey 2002; Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Coupland 2001; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006; Kroskrity 1993, 1999; Wilce 1998a, 1998b). My approach builds on these traditions, with systematic attention to the discourse forms through which participants negotiate and display who they are in French and Portuguese linguistic contexts. In this way, this book examines how bilinguals come to experience their multiple identities, as a result of how they experience their ways of speaking in each language. I use an unusual combination of both ethnographic and quasi-experimental methods to document how French-Portuguese bilinguals both experience themselves, and are perceived by others to be a different person in their two languages. This combination of methods has allowed me to compare systemati-

INTRODUCTION 5

cally the same participants’ performances of self in each of their two languages. After first establishing the ethnographic contexts in which French and Portuguese take on particular meanings for participants, I compare three sets of materials: (1) from speakers’ perspectives, how the same speakers explicitly report their senses of self in each language; (2) from a discourse analyst’s perspective, how participants actually present themselves in the “same” stories of personal experience in French and Portuguese; and (3) from listeners’ perspectives, how others perceive participants in both languages. This unique combination of approaches allows me to discuss in detail the nature of the transformations the same speaker undergoes, across the contexts associated with her different ways of speaking. Organization of the Book In chapter 2, I suggest theoretical approaches to understanding the phenomenon of multiple identities across multiple languages. I review literature that discusses the role of linguistic and cultural forms in local enactments and experiences of “self” or “identity.” Specifically, I espouse an approach to “self” informed by semiotic approaches to the study of discourse and identity, as first articulated by Sapir (1927/1985) and other linguists and linguistic anthropologists (Benveniste 1971; Besnier 1994a; Crapanzano 1992; Hill 1995a; Irvine 2001; Lee and Urban 1989; Ochs 1990, 1992; Silverstein 1976/1995, 1995, 1998; Singer 1980, 1989; Urban 1989, Wortham 2001). As noted by Crapanzano (1990, 1992) and Rosenberg (1990), many scholarly accounts of the cultural construction of self have paid insufficient attention to the discursive, pragmatic underpinnings of local notions of personhood. Similarly, Besnier (1994a) has argued that sustained attention to participants’ actual discursive practices provides renewed complexity to concepts of “selves” that are truly emergent in verbal interaction. From such a discourse-semiotic perspective, the “self” is not a monolithic, preverbal essence. Rather, it is inferred from those semiotic processes. In particular, my approach is informed by scholarship on indexicality (Ochs 1990, 1992; Peirce 1940; Silverstein 1976/1995, 2003) and voicing (Bakhtin 1981; Keane 1999; Wortham 2001; Koven 2002; Hill 1995a), as windows into the construction and enactment of self and other in discourse. With this perspective, I argue that in order to investigate empirically bilinguals’ reports of feeling like a different person in each of their two languages, one should attend to three features of the relationships among language, self, and context: (1). the semiotic theory of language adopted, (2). the actual discursive productions of bilinguals in their two languages, and (3). the local sociolinguistic contexts and language ideologies that bilinguals’ speech evokes, which together help produce a sense of the type of person a bilingual is. With these three features in mind, I also review previous research about the study of

6 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

bilingual selfhood. This review situates the studies that form the cornerstone of this book. To appreciate the connections between languages and identities, one must first explore the broader sociocultural worlds in which bilinguals’ language practices and values are embedded. In chapter 3, I present the local sociolinguistic contexts and identities at stake for the people discussed in the book— the lived contexts for what many Luso-descendants call their “double identities.” I draw from Bakhtinian concepts of voicing and heteroglossia, where languages and styles in the verbal repertoire of a community become associated with different kinds of values, social locations, and ideas of personhood (Eckert 2000; Gal 1979; Irvine and Gal 2000; Kulick 1992; Woolard 1998a). Consequently, multilinguals may use their multiple languages to enact a range of indexically associated identities. People’s different ways of talking (languages, dialects, or registers) then become not just superficial fluctuations of a single “core,” but tools that perform identity, central components of people’s experience and performance of who they are (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Silverstein 1998, 2003). I describe the larger transnational contexts through which participants experience themselves as having “two identities.” These macro-level contexts affect the life trajectories and inform the personas people are and are not able to perform in their different sociolinguistic contexts. Speakers’ speech practices and ideologies are situated within the broader contexts of their lives that straddle two monolingual, socially stratified, European nation-states, across which their recognized identities do not easily translate. Although these women have grown up bilingually, the different varieties of French and Portuguese they command are not socially equivalent. Because they occupy a range of specific social locations within and between French and Portuguese societies, they are immersed in a range of socially patterned ways of speaking in and between both languages. In short, associated with these languages are the identities of the young urban Parisian/suburbanite, second-generation immigrant (in France), versus the archaic, rural/provincial Portuguese villager, secondgeneration émigré (in Portugal). By virtue of speaking in the ways associated with these different contexts, these bilinguals often report that they feel like different people. Yet, when illuminated by these broader sociolinguistic contexts, the notion that these bilinguals may experience themselves as different in their two languages takes on fuller meaning. In chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, the semi-controlled studies that form the empirical heart of the book are presented. In each chapter I discuss one of three complementary approaches to examining how these bilinguals perform identities in each language: (1). analysis of speakers’ explicitly reported intuitions about the experience of using each language (chapter 4), (2). comparative analysis of discourse forms speakers use in each language (chapter

INTRODUCTION 7

5 and 6), (3). comparison of how listeners perceive speakers in French and Portuguese (chapter 7). More specifically, in chapter 4, I discuss speakers’ explicitly reported intuitions of how they feel speaking each language. Their reflections on their own experiences of speaking and being in each language are a rich site for examining how linguistic form produces psychologically and socially “real” effects. Most participants say explicitly that there is something quite different in their experience of speaking French and Portuguese, with many reporting that they feel they are not the same person in each language. Such introspective accounts, however, may not yield a transparent view of how speakers may be different. However, these materials provide insight into participants’ understandings of the relationships between language(s) and self, emotion, and interaction. In chapters 5 and 6, I address the actual discourse patterns these speakers produce in each language, which may underlie their reported experiences of difference. Specifically, I discuss the discourse patterns used in narratives of personal experience told in both languages. These stories come from a study in which people were asked to tell the same series of stories of personal experience twice, once in each language—each time to a different bilingual of the same age and background. In order to systematically compare speakers’ identity enactments in each language, I first present the analytic framework used to code speakers’ selfpresentations in French versus Portuguese stories in chapter 5. More specifically, building on Goffman’s notion of footing (Goffman 1974/1986, 1979/1981) and on Bakhtin’s idea of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986), as well as more recent applications (Hill 1995a; Wortham 2001), I use a framework to analyze the indexical strategies that speakers use to assume particular voices of selves and others in French and Portuguese. This analysis allowed me to devise a coding scheme motivated by these ideas, which then allows for quantitative analysis. The framework for narrative analysis presented in this chapter speaks on its own to those theories and methods of narrative analysis that address the sociopragmatic “meanings” of first-person stories. As such, I first present the methods of narrative elicitation and the analytic categories and framework for the analysis of narrative voicing separately in chapter 5. Having presented the methods and categories, I then report in chapter 6 the results of these analyses that show how people privilege particular perspectives of current and past selves and others more when speaking in French or Portuguese. Through application of this framework, I show how these bilinguals consistently “do” self-narration differently in French and Portuguese, and thus do different kinds of “identity” work in their two languages. It would be at best incomplete, and at worst ethnographically unwise to compare French and Portuguese tellings with no recourse to how each version

8 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

performs particular kinds of culturally recognizable stances and identities. Therefore, to go beyond the formal comparison of French and Portuguese narrative enactments of identity in chapters 5 and 6, in chapter seven the local meanings of these different ways of speaking are explored. To tap into local understandings of these ways of speaking, I enlisted local judgments of speakers’ identities and affective displays. Thus, in addition to asking bilinguals directly about their experiences of identity (chapter 4), and looking at formal discursive strategies they actually use in each language (chapter 5 and 6), I asked listeners to comment on their impressions of the original speakers’ French and Portuguese narrative performances. A follow-up study is also described in which I explored the indigenous interpretations of the personas speakers enacted across these contexts. I had other bilinguals react to audio-recordings of speakers’ narratives in two languages, asking listeners to tell me how they imagined the recorded speakers to be. We will see how listeners consistently perceived the original speakers as “not quite the same” in their two languages, often reporting that they felt as if they were dealing with two completely different speakers, from two different backgrounds, with two different sets of reactions. As one listener put it, “I feel like I’m dealing with two different girls, one who knows how to behave herself [in Portuguese], and the other who lets herself go [in French].” Another said, “In Portuguese I imagined a totally shy chick, but in French everything changes—she’s funnier; she asserts herself more.” Listeners tended to perceive the original speakers as more aggressive in French and more reserved and “hicklike” in Portuguese. Speakers thus evoked for listeners (who share a similarly divided cultural, social, and sociolinguistic background) compelling, culturally imaginable ways of talking and being. These reactive materials reveal the social psychological effects of the performance of these different ways of speaking. The materials presented across chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 demonstrate the specific indexical forms speakers use in their two languages, as well as the effects that the use of thee forms produces for participants. Linking speaker reports, discourse analysis, and listener reports, we have multiple, convergent sets of evidence about how the different verbal strategies that people use in each language effectively invoke locally meaningful personas. I argue that these different strategies are intertwined with people’s experience of being a different person. These combined materials lend complementary kinds of empirical support to the idea that these speakers are indeed performing different identities in their two languages—identities that are indexed by specific forms and are also phenomenally “real” to speakers and listeners. In chapters 4-7, I address trends across a sample of twenty-three people, and five listeners, without attending to how such trends are relevant for any specific speaker. Chapters eight and nine provide more ethnographic texture, by focusing on materials from two bilingual women. In these two chapters, I show how the patterns discussed emerge for Teresa and Isabel. I provide the biographical contexts of these women, that is, the role that each language has

INTRODUCTION 9

played in their transnational life histories and plans, in both Portugal and France. I then compare, in detail, individual examples of stories each told in French and Portuguese. I discuss how these particular women experience their bilingualism and its relationship to their ways of being and feeling. Finally, I relate analysis of the discourse forms in these women’s stories to their reports of how they feel in each language, and to listeners’ perceptions of them in French and Portuguese. These chapters will thus allow one to see how specific people use, experience, and are seen through the resources and contexts of their two languages. In the concluding chapter, I synthesize the significance of this research and the methodological and theoretical work it suggests. I discuss the work’s contribution to discursive, semiotically oriented approaches to subjective phenomena. Analysts may realize that people are “only” reacting to indexes of self and affect, but for participants, these socially saturated indexes are the “essence” of lived selfhoods. With detailed attention to the verbal forms through which subjective phenomena get enacted, interpreted, and experienced, this work shows how discourse-oriented scholarship can contribute to comparative discussions of personhood. As such, I address the work’s new approaches to questions of discursive or functional relativity (Hymes 1966; Lucy 1992, 1997; Blommaert 2005). That is, rather than grammar, the participants’ differences in French versus Portuguese are a result of the sociolinguistic resources available to speakers, which index different personas in French and Portuguese contexts. Methodologically, I discuss the value of hybrid work that allows analysts to examine the same phenomenon from multiple perspectives, through careful attention to the verbal forms through which subjective phenomena are enacted, interpreted, and experienced. Finally, in order to illuminate the connections between language and identity more generally, I ask under what sociolinguistic conditions social actors interpret and experience their different ways of talking as evidence of different identities. As a whole, the book addresses how language mediates local experiences of identity that many Euro-Americans describe in psychological terms. It takes questions that are raised by psychological anthropologists about the role of cultural and linguistic forms in the shaping of self and emotion and integrates them with a more discourse-oriented approach to how “selves” and “affects” are instantiated through indexical forms in talk. This work provides new approaches for systematically examining how social actors perform multiple socially and personally meaningful identities in sociolinguistically complex contexts. 1

These literatures are reviewed in chapter 2.

CHAPTER 2 DISCOURSE-SEMIOTIC APPROACHES TO BILINGUAL SELFHOOD

What theories of the relationships among language(s), culture(s), and self can best account for bilinguals’ experiences of being a “different person” in their two languages? As discussed in the preceding chapter, my approach to exploring bilinguals’ multiple experiences and displays of self builds on the insight that self is embedded in and emergent from discursive context and is variable for the same person across such contexts. More specifically, I draw from linguistic anthropological approaches to identity in discourse, through the lens of Bakhtinian voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and indexicality (Ochs 1990, 1992; Silverstein 1976/1995). This chapter first describes the principles of these approaches, and with these perspectives in mind, reviews the literature that has previously explored the issue of multilinguals’ experiences of multiple identities. I then present the rationale for investigating bilinguals’ performances and experiences of self, by attending to the socially indexical forms in discourse that summon up multiple, language-specific voices of selves and others in speakers’ two languages. Bakhtinian Perspectives to the Study of Self in Discourse I adopt an approach to the relationship between language and self that is heavily indebted to the writings of Bakhtin (1981, 1986), who discussed how an individual’s “selfhood” emerges through active, continuous struggle and interaction with surrounding perspectives and ideologies. An individual’s struggles to position himself/herself relative to these multiple perspectives are embodied in and through language. That is, people construe different ways of speaking (languages, dialects, and registers) as embodiments of different positions, values, and personas (Hill 1995a; Hill and Hill 1986; Keane 1999; Koven 2002; Wortham 2001). This Bakhtinian struggle for “selfhood” lends itself to empirical analysis, as it is a struggle manifest in and through the forms of everyday speech. These forms can then be investigated for how individual speakers “voice” themselves and others (Hill 1995a; Keane 1999; Koven 2002, 2004b; Wortham 2001). However, because there are numerous challenges to applying Bakhtin’s concepts directly to analyze real-time discourse (Bauman 1992, 2005; Koven 2002; Woolard 2004; Wortham 2001), I use Silverstein’s (1976/1995; 2003) notion of

12 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

indexicality to examine precisely how people use specific discourse forms to enact complexly voiced selves in speech. Below, I explain the analytic utility of the concept of indexicality to analyze the “voicing” of bilingual selfhood in discourse. Indexical Language, Context, and Self Indexical understandings of the relationship between self and language draw from semiotic perspectives in linguistic anthropology (Lee 1993; Lee and Urban 1989; Mertz and Parmentier 1985). Participants can only experience or infer the self, insofar as it is mediated by signs (Singer 1980). This semiotic approach to language borrows from a Peircean framework, in which there are multiple types of signs, that bear different relationships to the objects or concepts they stand for (Peirce 1940). Although a full discussion of Peircean semiotics is beyond the scope of this chapter, Peirce’s distinctions among indexes, icons, and symbols have been particularly productive (Mertz 1985; Peirce 1940; Silverstein 1976/1995). Indexes (linguistic and/or nonlinguistic) derive meaning through a relation of contiguity to the object/concept, by pointing to some element of context, in the way that a weather vane points to the direction of the wind. Icons are meaningful through a relation of resemblance, in the way that a map is similar to the terrain it stands for, or in the way that an onomatopoeia sounds like the concept it stands for. Symbols derive meaning through a relation of convention, as it is only social norm that establishes the arbitrary relation between the sign and what it stands for. Whereas Saussurean models of language have addressed symbolic (i.e., arbitrary, unmotivated) relations between signs and objects/concepts, with attention to more decontextualized, referential meanings, semiotic approaches to discourse have emphasized the more indexical nature of linguistic signs in context(s). From this perspective, linguistic signs therefore mediate the experience, display, and inference of selfhood not only referentially (through explicit, context-free designation or description), but through indexical relations of pointing or co-occurrence (Ochs 1990, 1992; Silverstein 1976/1995). It is through such indexical relations between linguistic signs and their contexts of occurrence that one can most productively study the relationship between language(s) and “selves.” What is an example of an indexical sign in language that is relevant to the study of “self”? As noted by Benveniste (1971), one key site where self or “subjectivity” emerges indexically is in the use of the first-person pronoun, “I” (in English). This form works indexically by pointing to the person who utters it. The “meaning” of “I,” current inhabitant of speaker role, is indexical, because it is only computable in context. “I” has no stable referent that transcends all contexts, but plays a key role in instantiating contextually based selves in specific speech events.

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Multiple Axes of Indexicality One should further specify the multiple ways in which linguistic forms can index “self” in discourse. Two key axes along which indexes can establish meaning are that of referential/nonreferential and that of presupposing/creative indexicality (Silverstein 1976/1995:210). These axes are both of importance for understanding how “selves” are discursively accomplished. Referential and Nonreferential Indexicality First of all, indexes may be relatively more referential or nonreferential. Indexes work referentially, when establishing their “meaning” contributes to propositional information, that is, the truth or falsity of a description of a state of affairs of a particular utterance in context. For example, “I will be there tomorrow,” is a description of a particular state of affairs that may be true or false, but its actual reference is only calculable in a specific context of speaking. We have no idea who will be where when, as the deictics of person (I), place (there), and time (will be, tomorrow) require specific contexts of speaking to establish their reference. But once that context is known, the utterance describes a state of affairs whose truth or falsity can be determined. In this example, the indexicals therefore contribute to referential meaning. Nonreferentially indexical signs, on the other hand, do not contribute to propositional meaning, but point to contextually relevant social, cultural, and/or affective meaning. For example, interjections such as “Man!” and “Ow!” (Jakobson 1960) and discourse markers such as “Well,” “Hmm,” (Schiffrin 1986) do not describe states of affairs, and have purely nonreferential meanings. Other examples of nonreferential indexicality include use of sociolinguistic variation within and across languages. When there are multiple ways of “saying the same thing” differentially distributed across a community or available to the same speaker, each variant may become a nonreferential index of social context, speaker identity, and/or affective stance (Silverstein 1998). This type of nonreferential indexicality is captured by Bakhtin’s notion of voicing, that is, that different ways of speaking nonreferentially index sociocultural positions, values and personas (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). In any given historical moment of verbal ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system . . . there are no neutral words and forms—words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete, heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. (1981: 290-293)

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In this way, nonreferential indexicality is a critical site for the instantiation of subjectivity (identity, stance, and affect) in discourse. However, many indexical forms have both referential and nonreferential meanings that are simultaneous, yet independent of each other (Silverstein 1976/1995). For example, address terms, such as the informal and formal second-person pronouns Tu or Vous work referentially and nonreferentially (Brown and Gilman 1960/1972; Friedrich 1972; Morford 1997). That is, they simultaneously refer indexically to a specific addressee, as well as they may nonreferentially index something about the relationship between participants, participants’ respective identities, and their affective stances toward each other. It is on the level of nonreferential indexicality that identities, cultural “meanings,” and affect are most typically summoned up (Ochs 1990). Presupposing and Creative Indexicality In addition to referential versus nonreferential indexicality, indexes may be relatively more presupposing or creative. That is, they can point to a dimension of context whose existence has already been established, or they can themselves bring about a change in the context. For example, when undergraduates on a North American college campus call me “Professor Koven,” they typically presuppose or assume something about our interaction and relative identities. These may include that the students and I are engaged in particular speech events associated with teaching/learning (e.g., lecturing or class discussion), asymmetric role relations of teacher/student, differences in generation, and so forth.1 Once this address form has been established as the norm in classroom interaction, it becomes all the more presupposable to participants throughout and across subsequent interactions. The particular speech event, relational, identity, and affective frames summoned up by this form of address may come to seem relatively stable to participants. However, verbal interaction is not always stable and predictable. For example, students intermittently call me Michèle. In either instance, both Michèle and Professor Koven are referentially equivalent—they both successfully designate me. Nevertheless, use of each form may nonreferentially index something different to participants. Shifts between the forms are then creatively indexical, as they point to or summon up novel dimensions of context—a different interpretation of the interaction (i.e., that it is more or less hierarchical), our relative identities (teacher-student versus young adult–young adult), and affective stances (i.e., more reserved versus more relaxed). Their very use may alter the course of the subsequent interaction, bringing about a change in participants’ relationships, identities, and/or affective stances (Friedrich 1972), perhaps transforming me from a more distant-seeming, older faculty member to a less intimidating, more approachable, younger female. Any given form may be relatively more

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presupposing or creative, depending on the usage prior and subsequent to a particular moment in the interaction, and the norms of that specific cultural context.2 It is through the balance of presupposing and creative indexes over the course of the interaction that relationships, identities, and affect may be invoked as relevant, or change in their relevance. Therefore, the relative presupposedness and/or creativity of nonreferential indexicals is also key for examining how identity, persona, and affect are evoked in discourse. Indexicality and Self across Speech Events With attention to these different dimensions of indexicality, analysts have examined a variety of discursive forms through which participants point to “self” in real-time discourse. Urban (1989) expanded Benveniste’s discussion of how first-person pronouns index subjectivity, beyond the referential indexing of the speaker in the immediate interaction. He showed how Shokleng speakers use first-person pronouns to speak through the voices of cultural figures from a mythical realm. “I” then indexically invokes for participants an entire cultural universe of mythical selves and others through which the speaker can projectively identify. Urban suggests that such “I’s” of performance may be pivotal sites for examining connections between self and culture—how individuals come to appropriate culturally recognized personas. Others have looked at such indexical forms across the multiple frames of storytelling, where narrators must present, perform, and comment upon “thereand-then” narrated selves and others in the story world relative to the selves and others of the current “here-and-now” narrating interaction (Bauman 1986; Goffman 1974/1986, 1979/1981; Jakobson 1957, 1960; Koven 2001, 2002; Miller, Fung, and Mintz 1996; Hill 1995a; Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001; Schiffrin 1996; Wortham 2001). For example, quotations often serve as important discursive strategies where participants make voices of selves and others from other contexts come to life as particular types of people in the here-and-now. Participants in the current interaction must then position themselves relative to the quoted personas, perhaps laughing at the questionable deeds of a quoted past persona (Miller, Fung, and Mintz 1996; Koven 2002), or seeming to fully reinhabit or identify with that quoted past self (Wortham 2001). In this way, participants indexically instantiate a complex dialogue between “selves” across narrating and narrated speech events. Furthermore, within different storytelling frames (of the interaction in which the story is told as well as those of the different narrated events), participants may then also use the nonreferential indexicality of language, register, or dialect. For example, they may tell the story about an unpleasant character, and make that character’s unpleasantness come to life by quoting him with a stereotypical accent. That is, by putting different sociolinguistically marked ways of speaking in the mouths of different speaker roles, participants may

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transform current and past selves and others into locally recognizable types of people. In looking at how people use indexical forms to summon up and comment upon contexts and identities different from those of the immediate hereand-now, this is therefore an application of Bakhtin’s notion of voicing (Bakhtin 1981; Hill 1995a; Keane 1999; Koven 2001, 2002, 2004b; Pujolar 2001; Wortham 2001). In my study of bilingual selfhood, I adopt this perspective of indexicality to investigate how participants “voice” (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) selves and others in discourse. Such a perspective allows us to ask how bilingual speakers summon up and position themselves relative to images of selves and others in and across their two languages, and how participants then experience these verbal images as expressions of speakers’ “selves” in their two languages. Previous Scholarship on Bilingualism and Selfhood In the following portion of this chapter, the perspective outlined above is used to review previous scholarship on bilingual selfhood. Because the topic of multilingualism and its impact on self touches on myriad questions regarding the relationships among language, culture, and personhood, it has been addressed in multiple academic disciplines. Lucy (1992) noted the challenges of studying such inherently interdisciplinary problems in the social sciences. Although it is challenging and rare to have adequate training in these multiple perspectives and their concomitant methodologies, Lucy argued that to do justice to the multiple dimensions of the problem of linguistic relativity that he explored, one needs the full range of methods and concepts used by the different relevant research traditions. Specifically, Lucy advocated the systematic, controlled methods of experimental psychology, the attention to language structure of linguistics, and an understanding of the meanings and use of linguistic forms in daily life of anthropology. In reviewing relevant literature that explores the effects of the persona creating dimensions of bilinguals’ two languages, I borrow from Lucy’s methodological and theoretical interdisciplinarity. I review literature from multiple fields that has raised the issue of bilinguals’ language-specific identities including bilingualism studies, bilingual memoirists and scholarship about them, psychoanalytic literature on treatment with bilinguals, sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches to bilingualism, and experimental social and cross-cultural psychology. Criteria for the Study of the Relationships between Bilingualism and Self To focus the review of the literature, and to present the rationale for the discourse-semiotic perspective that informs the research on which this book is based, I advocate three important criteria in the study of the relationships between bilingualism and self: semiotic theory of language and its relation to context (described above), analysis of actual discourse, and attention to local

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ideologies and contexts. Together, these three criteria allow the analyst to examine how bilinguals use language to index different personas of self and other as an effect of “voicing”: 1. Semiotic Theory of Language and its Relation to Context First, I argue that in order to account for bilinguals’ changes in persona, we need to apply the semiotic understanding of how language relates to context (Silverstein 1976/1995, 1998, 2003), outlined above. That is, bilingual language use has “meaning” that is not only referential, but also indexical. In this way, language choice for bilinguals is a nonreferential index (Silverstein 1976/1995), deriving its meaning to participants by pointing to some dimension of interactional and cultural context, above and beyond any explicit propositional content. Beyond the propositional “content” of an utterance, participants may then understand a particular language choice and way of speaking within and across languages to “mean” a number of different things—about the context of speaking (e.g., that they are among intimates, and hence using dialect), about what type of person each participant seems to be (e.g., aggressive, snobbish), or the speaker’s affect (e.g., that the speaker is angry). It is through such nonreferential indexicality that different personas get evoked/invoked in bilinguals’ use of two languages. Furthermore, as outlined above, this semiotic understanding of language and persona in bilingual situations enables the analyst to look at how different contexts, relationships, and identities may be presupposed and/or creatively invoked through indexical speech. In other words, different types of bilingual speech can themselves effect a change in the “context.” For example, Blom and Gumperz (1972) demonstrated the importance of presupposing/creative indexicality of language choice in their discussion of situational and metaphorical code-switching. They observed that standard and dialectal Norwegian index different contexts—that is, to a certain extent, participants presuppose that others in their community will predictably use standard in certain settings and dialect in others. In this way, language can be a presupposing index of context. However, the authors showed how “context” does not always predictably determine language use, because speakers at times used the other, unexpected variety. Specifically, although intimates would normally only use dialect among themselves, during a passionate intellectual discussion, some switched into standard to invoke a certain authoritative stance. In this way, speakers imported the contextual associations of standard into the otherwise dialect-based interaction, using what the authors call metaphorical switches. That is, by switching ways of speaking within the “same” context, participants altered that context. As such, language cannot be seen as independent from “context,” but very much part of it.

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Such creative uses of language invoke new contexts and identities for participants. Different ways of speaking in bilinguals’ repertoires can therefore be performative of a particular socioculturally recognized identity. Thus, following Duranti and Goodwin (1992), Duranti (1992, 1997), and Silverstein (1976/1995), I argue that bilingual language-use works indexically to presuppose and/or transform context, and the personas assumed by participants in such contexts. These types of indexicality provide insight into the mechanism through which a bilingual might seem to become another person in his/her other language. 2. Analysis of Actual Discourse Second, to comprehend fully how language change can indexically precipitate a change in persona, one should also observe how such shifts manifest themselves in actual, real-time discourse. This is a methodological point about the type of data to collect and how to analyze it. What type of data will best reveal this? Ultimately, systematically analyzing the flow of indexical forms in bilinguals’ actual discourse allows one to observe persona shifts as they occur. The power of language to effect a change in context is a discursive phenomenon, best observed by examining changes in how participants produce and interpret actual discourse. How to analyze such data? To identify changes of persona in actual discourse, from an indexical perspective, the analyst should investigate not just what participants say, but how participants speak. That is, changes in persona may not only be found on the level of content, but in how participants use language to navigate the interaction, perhaps using what appear to be different ways of saying the “same” thing referentially. As such, we need specific discourse-analytic tools to examine how language, context, and speaker identity index each other: how participants use language to point to the often unnamed identities they enact. This will yield insight into how bilinguals actually perform their multiple identities in speech. 3. Attention to Local Language Ideologies and Contexts When much of the performance may be conducted implicitly, how does the analyst know what personas an individual is performing? Recognizing which personas bilinguals are enacting is best done in ethnographic context to access local cultural knowledge of how a way of speaking indexically evokes/invokes a particular persona for people in the bilinguals’ multiple communities of practice. Part of this local cultural knowledge is embedded in systems of beliefs or ideologies of language that indexically link ways of speaking and identities (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Silverstein 1979, 1998). People tacitly appeal to these language ideologies when they infer their own or others’ identity from discourse. That a bilingual speaker is perceived or experiences him or herself to be a particular type of person in each language is thus an

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effect of linking each language to locally stereotypic beliefs about types of people, stances, and values.3 In this review of literature relevant to the current study, I discuss how the different traditions accomplish these three criteria—semiotic understanding of language, attention to actual discourse and ethnographic context. General Monographs about Bilingualism While leaving notions of “personality” and its relation to language relatively underexplored, many general monographs about bilingualism have commented on the common observation that bilinguals shift “personalities” when they shift languages. However, whereas earlier writings often either exaggerated or pathologized the effect of bilingualism on psychological functioning, more recent scholarship has often minimized its effect. In both cases, there is little account of why and how language shift could produce this oft-reported effect of personality change. The association of bilingualism with psychopathology and “split personalities” can be situated primarily in the first half of the twentieth century (Pavlenko 2006a, 2006b). According to Pavlenko, this earlier ambivalence toward bilingualism came from its connections to immigrants and other linguistic minorities in Europe and North America. However, even somewhat later scholars of bilingualism, such as Diebold (1968) and Adler (1977), reported the profound effect of bilingualism on psychological functioning, speculating about the detrimental effects of bilingualism on personality and emotional functioning. Diebold asked whether bilinguals are more susceptible to mental illness than their monolingual counterparts. Both wondered whether some bilinguals have “split minds,” and speculated that ultimately many may be “marginal men.” Despite the pessimism of these reports, both authors conclude that any personality difficulties that bilinguals suffer result from the stress of living in monolingual contexts, where their multiple languages and the associated social meanings of those languages are not validated. Putting aside such a pathological view of the psychological impact of bilingualism and biculturalism, these authors nonetheless highlight that bilingualism has a profound influence on people and is filled with social and emotional meaning. Countering earlier scholarship that pathologized bilingualism, more recent authors of general monographs of bilingualism have tried to normalize bilinguals’ experience. As a result, some have downplayed the impact of language on bilinguals’ senses of self. In several texts about bilingualism, authors have dismissed the oft-raised question of whether bilinguals shift personalities as they shift languages, by concluding that the changes reported or observed are not really about personality (Hamers and Blanc 1989; Grosjean 1982; Bialystok 2001). For example, although Grosjean provides intriguing quotes from bilinguals who report feeling like a different person in their two languages, he con-

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cludes that this is “simply a shift in attitudes and behaviors corresponding to a shift in situation or context.”(Grosjean 1982: 283, emphasis mine), thereby minimizing the profound effect of language on the experience of self. Within this perspective, those bilinguals who feel that they have a different personality in each language are merely experiencing language-independent changes in context. In so doing, the author posits language as separate from the contextual changes, instead of directly instrumental in them. Similarly, Bialystok (2001: 242) also stated that mastery of the pragmatic conventions associated with each language may lead people to feel different, or to have a “different persona,” but then refers to this as an “illusion of personality transformations,” stating that “much of the apparent difference in personality is a façade that comes with the grammar of the language”(242, emphasis mine). Therefore, in an attempt to render the experience of bilingualism less peculiar-seeming, these scholars attribute bilinguals’ anecdotal reports of feeling like a different person to misleading impressions. The possibility a person might “really” change when they switch languages is framed as so implausible that it is made to seem unworthy of empirical investigation.4 In such accounts, “personality” could not really be altered, as it is assumed to be underlying and stable across contexts (and the purview of a different discipline), and not inextricably linked with language. However, following Duranti and Goodwin (1992), Bauman and Briggs (1990), and Silverstein (1976/1995), context and language are not neatly separable, independent variables. Language is part of the emergent context in which identities are experienced and displayed. Without going so far as to claim that bilingualism causes psychopathology, or outright dismissing bilingualism’s effect on subjectivity, with a more fully articulated understanding of the relationships between language, context, and person, one can maintain that a bilingual’s languages may indeed affect who he or she can be. Bilingual Memoirists and Literature about Them Bilingual memoirists have vividly described firsthand the experience of having two linguistically based selves (Green 1985: Hoffman 1989; Kaplan 1993; Rodriguez 1982; Steiner 1975; Todorov 1985). Bilingual author Julien Green (1985), for example, describes the experience of the feeling of becoming another person when he writes in his other language. I began my [English] book, wrote about a page and a half and, on rereading what I had written, realized that I was reading another book, a book so different in tone from the French that a whole aspect of the subject must of necessity be altered. It was as if, writing in English, I had become another person . . . There was so little resemblance between what I wrote in English and what I had already written in French that it might also be doubted that that same person was the author of these two pieces of work. (Green 1985:182)

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To better understand the relationship between self and language for bilinguals, a handful of applied linguists and literary critics have subsequently analyzed the experiences of these authors (Beaujour 1989; Besemeres 2002, 2006; Kinginger 2004; Pavlenko 1998, 2001c, 2001d, 2006a, 2006b). Besemeres (2002), for example, provides detailed analysis of the works of multiple bilingual authors, arguing that using a different language compels a shift in self. “One way in which there can be movement between the different ‘selves’ a person is capable of being in speaking different languages is that each language projects a range of psychological attributes. An individual, in a sense, inhabits the model of person implied by the given language” (20). Pavlenko (2001) examines a corpus of thirty bilingual memoirs and/or narratives of people who recount their experiences of living between languages and cultures. In particular, she discusses how these bilingual/bicultural narrators reported experiencing different types of gender identities in the communities of practice associated with their two languages. This split may heighten people’s sense that they are not the same person in their two languages. Rather than an analysis of these different discursive performances per se, Pavlenko’s analysis primarily analyzes participants’ explicit accounts about the relationships among language, gender, and identity, rendered in one of their languages. In Beaujour’s discussion of bilingual authors’ affective dilemmas of language choice (1989), she compellingly illustrates how language is inextricably linked to context and persona for the bilingual author. In this way, language is part of the context of the self. In her counter to Grosjean’s earlier reported statement that appearances of bilingual personality shifts are language independent (see above), she replies that “when [writers] . . . actually sit down to write, and choose one language rather than the other, nothing is ‘independent of language’ anymore. Using language in its literary mode, nothing is ‘independent of language’ anymore” (1989:45). Although her focus is on bilinguals’ written productions, I extend this perspective on how language triggers different contexts of self to oral contexts. What can bilingual authors ultimately tell us about the relationships between language and selfhood for bilinguals more generally? How these bilinguals’ written self-expression compares to that of bilinguals whose primary medium of linguistic expression is oral, or even how it compares to their own bilingual self-expression in other nonliterary contexts, is an important empirical question. Furthermore, when bilinguals engage in the speech event of memoir writing, they typically write about their experiences of language and identity in only one language at a time,5 rather than providing displays or acts of bilingual identity in their two languages.6 Therefore, these bilingual memoirists and those who have written about them capture elegantly some of the dilemmas of being a social and psychologi-

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cal person in two languages. The current work builds on their insights, using the oral productions of an ethnographically situated group of bilinguals, not only in their reflections about how language affects them, but also in their implicit performances of personas in their two languages. Bilinguals in Psychotherapy Based on their work with bilingual clients, a few psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists have discussed how bilinguals seem like different people in their two languages (Amati-Mehler, Argentieri, and Canestri 1994; Aragno and Schlachet 1996; Buxbaum 1949; Foster 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c; Greenson 1950). As many researchers have come to understand the psychoanalytic process as an extended narration of personal experience (Cohler 1982; Schafer 1976, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1992; Spence 1982), psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists are well placed to consider the complex relationships between language(s) and self-expression.7 Since Freud’s time, many analysts and analysands have had to address the issue of both parties’ multiple languages on the course of this verbally mediated treatment (Amati-Mehler, Argentieri, and Canestri 1994). In psychoanalytic writings, bilingualism plays a role in psychotherapy in two ways that are relevant to the current research. (See Schrauf [2000] and Pavlenko [2006a, 2006b] for excellent, detailed reviews of the psychoanalytic writings about bilinguals). First of all, bilingual patients may display and experience different versions of themselves in their two languages. Secondly, bilinguals may narrate past personal experiences with access to different degrees of affective intensity in their two languages, typically greater in their “mother tongue.” Below I describe how authors have addressed these two related issues of having two different “selves” and different affective intensities associated with speaking each language. As we will see, although many authors imply that each language summons up contexts and personas associated with contexts in which those languages were first learned and used, few have a fully articulated theory of how talk accomplishes this. The idea that bilinguals seem to evoke a different version of themselves in each language in therapy has been noted by multiple authors (Amati-Mehler, Argentieri, and Canestri 1994; Foster 1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c; Greenson 1950; Marcos, Uruyo, Kesselman, and Alpert 1973; Marcos and Alpert 1976; Marcos 1976a, 1976b, 1977; Pavlenko 2006a, 2006b; Schrauf 2000). Greenson (1950: 19) described his work with a German-English analysand who claimed that she felt like two separate people: “In German I am a scared, dirty child; in English I am a nervous, refined woman.” Greenson states that a second language “offers an opportunity for the establishment of a new self portrait. This may supplant the old images or new images may co-exist along with the old, which might lead to a kind of ‘multiple personality’” (21). Greenson uses psychoanalytic theories of pre-oedipal development to explain how language and

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self-image are linked. Indeed, his analysis of these intriguing materials would benefit from more contemporary understandings of discourse. More recently, Foster (1992) has argued that moving between a bilingual’s two languages has a profound impact on the therapeutic interaction, specifically because language choice affects the personas patient and therapist enact with each other in the “transference-countertransference.” Foster argued that bilinguals may have different versions of self connected to their two languages, where language is a “characterological organizers . . . signifiers of unique selfrepresentations internalized at the time of respective language acquisition” (1996c: 99). In particular, Foster describes the case of a Spanish-English bilingual woman, who sought a Latina therapist, but refused to speak Spanish with her. One day Foster (the therapist) let slip a Spanish utterance at the end of a session. This switch to Spanish provoked a profound change in therapy. Up until that point, the patient had tried to maintain a reserved, controlled persona by speaking English. Speaking Spanish evoked the patient’s relationship with her mother, in which “she is her mother’s frightened, dependent child” (1992: 70). Switching languages provoked a transformation of both the patient and therapist; As the patient shifts the lingual aspect of his or her narrative, so does he or she shift the specific aspect of the self that is speaking and the object (vis-à-vis the analyst) that is being spoken to. My signal that this has taken place is not only the music of the new language, but often my own transformation in the presence of the patient, who somehow in a linguistic instant can sculpt me into another. (1992:68–69)

A great strength of Foster’s account is her focus on how a change of language influences simultaneously the interaction between therapist and patient and the personas both enact with each other through the two languages. Foster demonstrates the profound psychological meaning and impact of code-switching, essentially describing the creatively indexical (Silverstein 1976/1995) or metaphorical (Blom and Gumperz 1972) power of code-switching described above. Like the other authors, without directly invoking contemporary theories of indexicality, she hints at semiotically potent aspects of language. That bilinguals may display lesser affective engagement in languages learned after childhood has been noted by multiple psychoanalytic writers (Aragno and Schlachet 1996; Buxbaum 1949; Marcos, Uruyo, Kesselman, and Alpert 1973; Marcos and Alpert 1976; Marcos 1976a, 1976b, 1977; Pavlenko 2006a, 2006b; Schrauf 2000).8 Some even report that the bilingual has less easy access to childhood memories when using a language different from the one used at the time of important childhood experiences (Buxbaum 1949; Javier 1995; Schrauf 2000). Indeed, some of these authors state that bilingual patients may strategically exploit the lesser intensity of their second language in order to avoid evoking painful material. Buxbaum (1949) described two cases of

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adult bilinguals who could only make progress in therapy when they switched to German, their childhood language, because of its greater evocative power. One patient explicitly recognized the power that such a switch might have (283): “I know I should speak German to you—but I don’t dare. I don’t know what would happen. I’d probably go to pieces!”9 Aragno and Schlachet (1996) describe the seeming emotional detachment of bilinguals recounting experiences in a language other than the one in which events occurred: “the second language does not conjure the vibrant hues and emotional urgency embedded in the sounds of the first” (28). They claim that memory traces are “inextricably bound to the language and cultural context of origin” (23). These authors also hint at the indexical power of language, noting that “words are first learned as referencing sounds at a developmental stage in which the associative triggers are one with the object or subject of reference; that is they ‘equate with’ rather than represent, and function with the immediacy of signs and signals rather than with the expressive detachment of a true symbolic vehicle” (1996:32).10 As a group, these psychoanalytic authors compellingly attest to the evocative power of each of a bilingual’s two languages to alter the course of (the therapeutic) interaction: to invoke multiple personas from other temporal, linguistic, and cultural contexts; and to engage affect with different degrees of intensity. Similarly, what can truly be appreciated in discussions of case materials from bilingual patients is the importance of individual trajectories and meaning systems. While culturally patterned, each person develops somewhat idiosyncratic associations with each language. Although many of the authors present detailed reconstructions of case materials with bilingual patients, these authors typically do not provide extended transcripts with discourse from patients using their two languages. As a result, because these authors do not look at discourse directly, it is somewhat unclear how concepts like “different self” and “affective expression” are instantiated in actual discourse. None of these authors provides a linguistically informed framework for explaining how affect is engaged and indexically instantiated through speech. Nor do they account for how a sense of self becomes linked to two languages, and is then projected through speech in realtime. The absence of empirical data, such as transcripts of the interaction, make it somewhat challenging to fully observe how the indexical links between language and persona are made in the therapeutic interaction. As such, although these authors raise crucial questions within the context of psychotherapy, they may not fully explain the more general relationships among language, context, and self that could account for the multiple senses of self that bilinguals describe.

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Sociolinguistic and Linguistic Anthropological Research on Code-Switching and Identity Researchers of multilingual code-switching in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have observed how people seem to switch identities as they switch languages. Although focused more on discourse strategies than identity and persona-display per se, Gumperz (1982) discussed how metaphorical codeswitches between we (in-group) and they (out-group) codes may “personalize” or “objectivize” subsequent utterances. A switch to the they code may make the utterance seem more authoritative, whereas a switch to the we code may make the utterance seem more like an engaged, personal appeal. In this way, one sees how, through repeated usage, each code could come to accumulate affective and persona-creating associations.11 Indeed, following in this tradition of examining the social meanings of code-switching, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have studied how the presence of multiple languages or multiple styles of the same language become an important resource for how speakers evaluate and perform a range of socioculturally meaningful identities and values (Coupland 2001; Ervin-Tripp and Reyes 2005; Gal 1979; Gumperz 1982; Heller 1988; Hill and Hill 1986; Kulick 1992; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Myers-Scotton 1993, 1998). In her seminal 1979 ethnography of bilingual Oberwart, Gal highlighted how persona management and language choice are linked. “As I got to know bilingual speakers in Oberwart, it became increasingly apparent that changes in their language choices derived from changes in how they wanted to present themselves in interaction” (xi). Later in her monograph, she states that “choice of styles or languages is seen as a strategy on the part of speakers trying . . . to present themselves as individuals with certain . . . qualities or to convey a particular attitude or impression”(91).12 Such persona-indexing uses of language do not derive from the referential or grammatical dimensions of each language. This scholarship makes clear that bilinguals’ use of two languages produces such effects as a result of nonreferential, sociopragmatic functions of language. Neither are associations between a particular language and persona connected in some homogeneous way or for all speakers of that language. Rather, each language has different identity-evoking meanings only by how it is embedded within local systems of meanings and as those meanings and languages circulate within people’s social networks. Such ethnographic accounts of how different ways of speaking evoke different personas resonates with a Bakhtinian perspective, in which different ways of speaking are inescapably indexical of different social voices (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). Indeed, Woolard (2004), following Hill (Hill and Hill 1986), argues that code-switching should be linked to Bakhtin’s concept of voicing, “where the voice is the social intention to which a given echoic linguistic

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form-in-use or ‘word’ is infused. We receive all our linguistic forms through others’ uses, and thus, each form carries other voices” (87). More specifically, to apply Bakhtin’s concepts to discursive data with greater precision, she suggests that we understand the relationship between voicing and codeswitching through Silverstein’s notion of social indexicality (1976/1995, 2003). Silverstein’s dynamic notion of social indexicality allows one to see precisely how particular ways of speaking come to accrue their different social and psychological meanings in context. “The indexical value of a linguistic form can be transferred ideologically not just from context to context, but from context to speaker, or vice versa, and can be transformed in the process. Individuals who use the kind of language now perceived as authoritative can project themselves as authoritative kinds of people” (89). With this socially indexical approach to Bakhtin, one can see how different ways of speaking may become linked to different personas in specific sociolinguistic contexts. Anthropological scholars of code-switching have also adopted a Bakhtinian perspective because it allows one to examine the relation between language choice and identity on both macro- and micro-social levels. In this way, the social meanings of code choice can be linked to meanings beyond “personality” and “identity” in a micro-level interpersonal sense, to a more macro-level perspective on people’s positionings in larger political economies (Gal 1987; Hill and Hill 1986; Hill 1995a; Kulick 1992; Woolard 1985).13 Language-choice indexes therefore not only one’s subjective sense of self, but also one’s positioning in a larger socioeconomic order. Different ways of (combining ways of) speaking afford speakers different “consciousness” (Gal 1987; Hill 1985; Hill and Hill 1986). Hill (1995a) thus describes how Mexicanos position themselves relative to the different “voices” and moral universes associated with Spanish and Mexicano when they move between languages. Spanish has several potential meanings, as the language of capitalism, authority, and aggression. Mexicano, on the other hand, is the language of familiarity, peasant identity, and local connectedness. Within the speech of given individuals, one can feel the tension between the local and urban universes evoked by each language. For Don Gabriel, an elderly Mexicano gentleman, Spanish is thus the language of corruption that he adopts with reluctance. In this way, speakers’ struggles over language are as much about face-to-face identity negotiation as they are about speakers’ ambivalences toward their positions in capitalist versus peasant political economic orders. Together, these authors have provided rich ethnographic examples of how each language in the verbal repertoire of a bilingual community becomes semiotically linked with different kinds of values, social relations, social locations, and ideas of personhood, as well as different symbolic positionings of those communities in larger social, political, and economic contexts (Gal 1987).14

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Furthermore, methodologically, scholars in this tradition have tended to ground their analyses in actual instances of bilingual discourse, either as these emerge spontaneously in the course of everyday social life, or as elicited as part of a sociolinguistic or ethnographic interview (Hill 1995a). As such, scholars stick closely to the specific indexical forms in bilingual discourse that evoke different identities and stances. In this sense, this research is more ethnographically and discursively grounded than much of the other literature reviewed in this chapter. Experimental Studies of Personality, Self-Concept, and Self-Presentation in Bilinguals How the Language of Testing Affects the Response Whereas analysts of bilingual memoirists, psychotherapists, and anthropologists typically use qualitative methods and analyses, a handful of scholars have explored issues of bilinguals’ different “selves” in each language experimentally. Although some ecological validity may be lost by having bilinguals engage in experimental tasks that may differ from their behavior beyond the experiment, such research has the advantage of being able to examine systematically the role of different variables. Research in this tradition has consistently demonstrated an effect of language on how respondents perform experimental tasks. However, with some notable exceptions, little of this research has examined the actual discourse of bilinguals, and the meanings of bilinguals’ different language-based responses in ethnographic context. A number of experimental scholars have investigated how bilinguals respond differently, depending on the language in which they are tested. Research in this tradition has demonstrated that the language of response may change the response itself, on a variety of tasks. Typically, these tasks are intended to tap into participants’ cultural values, attitudes, identifications, selfconcepts, and personality. Several scholars have raised the question of the effect of language of response, not out of interest in how “self” varies for the same person across languages, but as an inquiry into the effect of instrument language in cross-cultural research more generally. One should not assume that participants will always answer in the same way, when queried in different languages (Kemmelmeier and Cheng 2004; Marin et al. 1983; Ralston, Cunniff, and Gustafson 1995; Yang and Bond 1980). Yang and Bond (1980) found that when given a written, forced-choice questionnaire about attitudes, Chinese-English bilinguals gave consistently different answers when responding in Chinese from when responding in English. Specifically, respondents gave more culturally “Chinese” responses when answering in English. The authors attribute this to participants’ “ethnic affirmation”—that participants emphasize their minority

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identity more when responding in the majority language. Ralston, Cunniff, and Gustafson (1995) found the opposite of Yang and Bond (1980)—that ChineseEnglish bilinguals display the value orientations of the culture associated with the language in which they responded. They refer to this as the “cultural accommodation hypothesis.”15 Marin, Betancourt, and Kashima (1983) also determined that Spanish-English bilinguals’ responses vary according to the language of the questionnaire. In addition to that of affirmation and accommodation, offered by Yang and Bond, they offer the explanation of social desirability. When trying to make a good impression on their imagined audience, bilinguals are more likely to respond in a way that gives what they perceive to be the “right” answer in their second language. What is the mechanism through which language change has this effect? Following up on the “cultural accommodation hypothesis,” Kemmelmeier and Cheng (2004) investigate how language itself triggers or cues the cultural frames with which it is associated, so that bilinguals may answer in culturally specific ways, depending on the language in which they are tested. Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martinez (2000) argue that biculturals “frame switch” between cultural perspectives, whereby something in the context activates a frame relevant for the other cultural perspective. In these studies, the language of the questionnaire triggered or activated different dimensions of participants’ behavior. Language thus works as a “prime”—a cue that activates different cultural systems of meaning. Although without comparable attention to discourse itself, this perspective is quite compatible with that offered in contemporary linguistic anthropology of how language can creatively index new dimensions of context. This paradigm of research has yielded compelling results, but has certain methodological limitations. Using written questionnaires, few scholars in this tradition look at actual oral discourse produced by bilinguals in their two languages. In other words, these scholars find a discursive effect, but without attention to actual discourse. Responses in a language other than English are typically first translated into English, before coding. This practice leaves no possibility of analyzing how people speak. As such, analysts focus on the referential content of participants’ answers, not the discursive forms. Moreover, we have too little information about the ethnographic meanings of each language to participants, to account for the meanings of these results. Experimental Exploration of Bilinguals’ Language-Specific “Selves” Most directly relevant to the current study, some scholars have also observed that the language of response affects “personality” and/or “self-concept,” as measured by a variety of different instruments.

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Susan Ervin-Tripp (Ervin 1964, 1968) conducted a seminal study of the relationships between bilingualism and “personality.” She administered the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a projective personality test, to FrenchEnglish bilinguals and found within-subject content differences related to the language used. Participants emphasized achievement themes more in English, and themes of verbal aggression more in French.16 Ervin-Tripp provided several possible accounts to explain her intriguing findings, each of which involved the power of each language to summon up other contexts. It is quite possible that a shift in language is associated with a shift in social roles and emotional attitudes. Since each language is learned and usually employed with different persons and in a different context. The use of each language may come to be associated with shift on a large array of behavior. (1964:506; emphasis mine)

In this way, language, context, and response become connected by association. In a different study, Ervin-Tripp (1968) found a similar shift in how JapaneseEnglish bilingual participants perform on sentence-completion tasks that reveal attitudes and values, depending on the language they use. In response to the initial prompt “When my wishes conflict with my family . . .” the Japanese response from one participant was, “It is a time of great unhappiness.” In English, however, the same respondent replied, “I do what I want” (Ervin 1968: 203). Ervin-Tripp therefore implicitly relates her findings to the capacity for each language to index the social, cultural, and affective experiences associated with each language’s contexts of use.17 Hull (1990) followed up on Ervin-Tripp’s study, with three studies in which he assessed within-subject personality differences, dependent on the language spoken. In the first study, bilingual participants (Chinese-English, Mexican Spanish-English, and Korean-English bilinguals) were administered the California Psychological Inventory. All three bilingual groups showed significant differences, depending on the language tested. The next two studies involved participants’ rating personalities of themselves and others based on brief interactions in each language. Again, he found significant differences for the same participants across languages. Furthermore, the same types of differences were salient across these three studies. A great strength of Hull’s work is his use of multiple methods to investigate and confirm the same phenomenon, as I do in the studies reported in this book. It would, however, have been interesting if Hull had systematically recorded and compared the discourse participants produced in each language that may have led to participants’ rating each other as different. It would also have been worthwhile to know what these differences “meant” or evoked to participants, in their respective cultural contexts. Several studies have been conducted to determine whether bicultural bilinguals, for whom one of their languages is associated with a culture the authors

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describe as more “individualist” and the other with a more “collectivist” culture display more or less “individualist” versus “collectivist” orientations in their “self-concepts” when responding in their two languages. Trafimow et al. (1997) found that Chinese-English bilinguals answer questionnaires about their self-concepts in more individualistic or collectivistic ways depending on the language of response—in particular, participants gave more individualistic responses in English. Ross, Xun, and Wilson (2002) compared Chinese-English bilinguals’ self-concepts in their two languages, using open-ended written selfdescriptions and structured closed questions about cultural beliefs. On the structured measures, participants responding in Chinese showed greater support of Chinese beliefs than did those answering in English. Open-ended descriptions were coded for collectivist versus individualist statements about the self. In these, participants mentioned their ethnic/cultural background more when answering in Chinese than in English. Participants also referred to others slightly more when answering in Chinese than in English, and wrote somewhat more private statements when responding in English. The authors argue that when participants use Chinese, they more readily evoke culturally Chinese notions of self. The authors conclude that “bicultural individuals can shift from one cultural self-concept to another, depending on what is called for in a given situation” (1049), and that language itself can activate a new “situation.” Indeed, they seem to point to the creatively indexical power of language, without using that particular conceptual apparatus. Similarly, they did not treat participants’ written answers as discourse to be analyzed for its form. The openended self descriptions were all translated into English before coding, instead of being coded in the original language—treating the content as separable from the form. As a group, these experimental studies present intriguing, consistent results that the language of response has an impact on how people respond. However the mechanism through which language-change triggers “personality change” is not always entirely clear. Similarly, as scholars typically focus on the referential content, there is scant attention to the actual ways bilinguals speak in each language. These studies typically approach personality, self-concept, values, attitudes, and so forth as underlying content. Few examine how bilinguals use discursive form as the very medium through which they indexically display these phenomena. Therefore scholars are noting a pragmatic phenomenon—how language-change plays a role in creatively transforming context—without actually treating the speech produced by bilinguals as discourse to be analyzed in context. There are few authors who have compared the actual discourse forms produced by bilinguals in each language and how those forms relate to the display of self.18 Marian and Kaushanskaya (2004) investigated how the language spoken affects self-construal and emotion for Russian-English bilinguals. The au-

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thors posit Russian as a collectivistic culture, and the American as an individualistic culture. They hypothesized that bilinguals would display more individualistic self-construals when speaking English, and more collectivistic when speaking Russian. The discursive features they focused on were uses of firstperson plural versus singular pronouns (I versus We) as an index of these different orientations. The authors found that participants told more of their English-language narratives with a singular first-person pronoun, and more of their Russian narratives with a plural first-person pronoun, confirming their original hypothesis. However, the precise mechanism through which this shift happens is somewhat unclear. The authors explain that their results “may be indicative of differences in self-construal and cultural values . . . a bilingual’s language may influence cognitive styles . . . We propose that the bilingual self is mediated by the language spoken at any given time and that language functions as a vehicle for culture” (197). With a more precise understanding of how specific types of language-use indexes both self and culture, the mechanism may be further illuminated. The present study reported in this book builds on this experimental line of research. Following this tradition, the research presented in this book also explores how a change in language may change the nature of participants’ responses. My work differs, however, in that I use a more sociolinguistic methodology to focus systematically on how particular ways of speaking in each language produce impressions of personality for speakers and listeners. This allows me to pay attention to the indexical forms in discourse, and their local meanings for participants. In this book, I therefore argue that one cannot speak of the expression of “personality” in speech without also looking at the discursive forms which instantiate it, so that “personality” is not taken to be a stable underlying content that language then merely expresses differently. I examine in detail the form of participants’ responses in the actual discourse of both languages, in the original language, and the local meanings of the differences between French and Portuguese responses. Conclusion How to synthesize the different research traditions that have explored how and why bilinguals may seem to be different people in their two languages? The study of bilingual identities is challenging, in part because it is an intrinsically interdisciplinary problem, requiring the concepts and methods of multiple scholarly disciplines. In order to examine how bilinguals “voice” different aspects of self and others in their two languages, and to see how those different voicings evoke a sense that an individual is not the same person in his/her two languages, in this book I build on the multiple traditions reviewed here. From the scholarship on bilingual writers and bilinguals in psychotherapy, I pay attention to how the meanings of individual’s languages and their experiences of

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self are mediated by biographical trajectories. Similarly, I adopt these scholars’ close attention to bilinguals’ firsthand reports of their experiences of identity in language (see especially chapters 4, 8, and 9). I borrow from sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches an attention to how bilinguals’ multiple personas are instantiated in actual discourse, in specific ethnographic contexts. I then adopt the systematic rigor of experimental approaches, as the ability to make comparisons across people and, for the same person, across linguistic contexts is greatly enhanced with more methodological control. As stated in the beginning of this chapter, an indexical understanding of language is crucial to understanding how different voicings of self are created across a speaker’s two languages. Particular kinds of language-use can invoke new kinds of contexts and identities, meaningful to participants. Furthermore, the use of a particular language or style of language itself can indexically create a new context for the same participants by bringing into play a new set of culturally meaningful frames (Duranti 1992, 1997; Goffman 1974/1986; Silverstein 1976/1995) in which different kinds of identities are made relevant and become performable. I will be looking at how French-Portuguese bilinguals use their repertoires of sociolinguistically meaningful speech forms in French and Portuguese, to indexically create and assume different socio-cultural identities in each language that are experientially real, and palpable both to speakers and to listeners. How do these studies reveal bilinguals’ speakers’ “selves”? First one must counter the notion that “self” is underlying content, beneath the superficial noise of (multilingual) discursive context. Following Crapanzano (1990), what people take to be the “self” is often essentialized from those features of interaction considered most salient in that cultural context. I will argue that the multiple senses of self that bilinguals report comes in part as a function of the pragmatic force of speakers’ use of different linguistic variants, within and across languages, to invoke different kinds of identities for themselves and others. As people layer their speech with a variety of indexes of identity from a range of registers within and across languages, a sense of a “self” is made palpably, experientially real in the interactional here-and-now. This experience of inhabiting socially recognizable identities in discourse may feel integral to a speaker’s experience of “self.” In order to understand how identity and language become linked, one must first learn about the broader contexts in which people’s language practices and values are grounded. In the next chapter, I discuss the sociolinguistic situations that provide the lived, sociolinguistic contexts and identities at stake for the people discussed in this book—contexts for what many Luso-descendants call their “double identities.” I examine how the languages and registers in the verbal repertoire of the French-Portuguese bilinguals in this study become associated with different kinds of values, social locations, and ideas of personhood.

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Their different ways of talking in and within French and Portuguese are tools that perform identity (Eckert 2000, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Silverstein 1998), not just superficial fluctuations of a single “core,” but central components of people’s experience and performance of who they are in different languages and contexts. 1

See Blommaert (2005) for a rich discussion of the multiple indexicalities of forms of address in university settings. 2 See Friedrich (1972) for examples of creative indexicality in rapid fluctuations of address terms within the same interaction. 3 Furthermore, following Gal (1979), attention to these ideologies and contexts should reveal whether the meanings of bilinguals’ language use are associated with variation within speakers’ languages, not only between them. In other words, the analyst should not assume bilinguals’ two languages are monolithic, homogeneous wholes, but should determine the socially indexical meanings of bilinguals’ different ways of speaking within their languages. 4 A notable exception to these trends of either pathologizing the effects of bilingualism on psychological functioning or dismissing its impact is the recent work of Pavlenko (2006a, 2006b). Pavlenko provides an excellent, interdisciplinary survey of the many ways in which bilingualism, emotions, and selfhood are related. Eclectic, the author does not espouse a unitary approach to the relation between bilingualism and personality. That said, one of the multiple approaches the author advocates is indeed discourse-based, compatible with that advocated in the present work. 5 Their skillful use of the language in which they publish may be an act of asserting legitimacy as a user of that language. The act itself of writing in English is performative of their legitimate identities as English speakers and Americans, as such writings allow them to disguise semiotic markers of difference, such as accent or physical appearance. See Pavlenko (2001b, 2001c). 6 Bilingual hybridity (in the casual speech among bilinguals who share the same languages) is one important site where bilinguals may perform certain aspects of identity, in those contexts where there is the possibility to activate both languages simultaneously (Hill 2001/1998; Jaffe 1999; Urciuoli 1998; Woolard 1998b). However, many bilinguals report the pressure to perform according to the monolingual standards of their two languages (Koven 2004a; Urciuoli 1998). Because of institutional constraints of writing and publication, published authors are held to particularly stringent monolingual norms. As such, there are constraints on the types of bilingual hybridity that such memoirists can engage in. 7 Lacan (1966) is of course another example of a psychoanalyst who saw the fundamental importance of language for psychoanalysis, and for subjectivity more generally. The child’s entry into the symbolic realm of language and culture is a pivotal, if traumatic moment in development. Indeed Cameron and Kulick (2003) argue that sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists should pay greater attention to Lacanian psychoanalytic theories that address the role of desire in verbal interaction. That said, in his adoption of a Saussurean model of language, Lacan’s approach to language focuses heavily on referential, rather than on indexical, pragmatic dimensions of language (Crapanzano 1992; Silverstein, p.c.). As Capps and Ochs (1995) note, even among psychoanalytic authors (not necessarily Lacanian) who advocate an understanding of treatment as one of collaborative narration, most do not typically attend to the specific discursive resources that people use in their narratives. There are, to my knowledge, few examples of scholarship that have applied Lacanian concepts to the analysis

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of real-time discourse. I adopt an approach to the study of the relationship between language and self that allows one to examine how “selves” unfold empirically in discursive interaction. 8 Scholars in other fields have noted this as well (Harris, Ayçiçegi, and Gleason 2003; Pavlenko 2006a, 2006b; Schrauf, Pavlenko, and Dewaele 2003; Dewaele 2006). A fuller discussion of the affective intensity in a second language is treated in chapter 6. 9 Buxbaum’s work is also noteworthy, in that she addresses the importance of socially indexical features of language, such as pronunciation. Specifically, she reported two cases of boys living in the United States of German parentage. Both boys had maintained German accents in their English, which disappeared over the course of treatment. According to Buxbaum, their accents revealed ambivalent relations toward their fathers, who also spoke English with strong German accents. Of particular interest, these accents were most obvious when the boys were imitating their elders in a hostile manner. Although Buxbaum did not have available to current theories of voicing, crossing (Rampton 1995), and social indexicality, she clearly indicates the importance of socially indexical features of speech such as accent in patients’ identifications and stance-taking toward significant others. 10 It is unfortunate that they make it seem that the indexical power of language is somehow more true of childhood and early development, rather than an intrinsic feature of the semiotic power of speech more generally. 11 Ervin-Tripp and Reyes (2005) link Gumperz’s discussion of metaphorical code-switching (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Gumperz 1982) to the contrasts in persona that many bilinguals display and report. 12 Another trend in sociocultural approaches to bilingualism also takes issue with treating each code in a bilingual individual’s or community’s repertoire as a monolithic whole. There is indeed growing interest in bilingual hybridity. As Urciuoli (1995, 1998) and Woolard (1998b) have argued, bilingual meaning is often generated at the boundaries between languages— where the linguistic form may simultaneously draw social meanings from its connections to more than one code. That is, speakers may not actually switch between languages, but creatively blend them. Following Bakhtin, speakers can blend forms and associated social voices from different languages in enormously creative ways. See also Koven (2004a). Furthermore, each “code” may itself be more internally differentiated, where speakers may also shift among multiple varieties within the same language (Bailey 2002; Gal 1979; Zentella 1997). 13 Persona-creating uses of language play a role in language shift itself, as less desirable personas become linked over time with particular ways of speaking. 14 Conversation analytic scholars of bilingual code-switching (Auer 1998; Sebba and Wooton 1998; Wei 1998) have taken issue with these approaches to the meanings of language choice in interaction. They argue that while each language may take on larger sociocultural meanings that can be evoked when the speaker uses a particular language, analysts should not assume that these meanings are always in play when participants use a particular code. Instead of assigning a single set of socially indexical meanings to bilinguals’ two codes, conversation analysts have advocated closer attention to the effects of shifts within particular interactions, as participants orient to them. According to conversation analysts, one cannot assume that the same social values, role identities, or personas are always indexed each time a bilingual uses a particular code. “Social identities can be seen to be flexible constructs, created, negotiated, and constantly changed in the course of interaction. There is no one-to-one mapping between these and ‘group identities.’ The linguistic medium by means of which social identities are constructed may itself be part of the identity, but we cannot assume a fixed relationship between a social identity and the language of the utterance that evokes (or invokes) it; rather,

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such relationships are themselves negotiated and constructed in the interaction, drawing on cultural resources located both inside and outside the interaction itself” (Sebba and Wootton 1998: 284). Stroud (1998) critiques both approaches, and argues that the micro and macro meanings of code-switching can only be ascertained in particular cultural contexts. Indeed, it is critical to always determine in a given stretch of discourse how both micro and macro social meanings are invoked. 15 In a follow-up study, Bond and Yang (1982) demonstrate that, at times, the language of response triggers more accommodative responses (like those associated with the cultural group associated with the language of response) or ethnicity affirmative. Nonetheless language of response directly changes the way participants answer questionnaires. 16 In this way, she also focused on the content, rather than the form of responses. 17 See also the work of Piller (2001, 2002), who has investigated the experiences of bilingual couples, where members do not share the same native language, but must nonetheless find intimacy with each other. Couples talked about the experience of not wanting to change the language they speak with their partner, for fear that it would not only change the quality of the interaction, but that their partner may seem a somewhat different person in the other language. “This sense of being a different person in different languages is brought up by the participants in a number of cases . . . and it is connected with knowing each other” (2002: 138). Piller cites one of her participants, Max, talking about his wife, “Okay it really sounds very different, when you speak English. And—and it is, mainly somehow somewhat stronger more cynical or—” (139). Piller then cites his partner, Teresa, who responds to Max’s perceptions of her in her two languages. She wonders whether she is “harder” in English than German, and whether she is indeed different in her two languages. Piller states, “It is probably the ‘nice girl’ who Max is in love with and that being ‘hard and cynical’ might alter the relationship”(140). 18 In a series of preliminary investigations that have led to the present study, Koven (1998, 2001, 2004b) investigated how French-Portuguese bilinguals present different versions of self when narrating versions of personal experience in their two languages. I mention these in passing, as the current study offers a similar perspective. In comparing the actual discourse forms participants used in French and Portuguese tellings of the “same” stories, I found that participants used ways of speaking that made them seem consistently different in French and Portuguese. I determined this using multiple methods, drawing from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. I compared discursive devices, qualitatively and quantitatively, known to contribute to “voicing” (Bakhtin 1981), footing (Goffman 1979/1981), or evaluation (Labov 1972b), which show how speakers present themselves and others in discourse. I then connected this formal analysis of the discourse to participants’ own descriptions of their experiences of self in each language, and to how others perceived them, based on listener responses to audio recordings of French and Portuguese tellings. I then gave an ethnographically grounded account of the meanings of each language. These women speak in different “self-producing” manners because of the gendered personas to which they have access in French and Portuguese contexts, associated with different ways of speaking.

CHAPTER 3 ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS OF LUSODESCENDANTS IN FRANCE AND PORTUGAL

To understand how identity and language become entangled for bilinguals, one must first learn about the sociocultural and biographical contexts in which their language practices and values are embedded. In order to appreciate the kinds of verbally performable identities the particular population of FrenchPortuguese bilinguals have at their disposal in each language, we first need to understand the complex positions they occupy in both French and Portuguese societies.1 This chapter therefore presents the local contexts and identities at stake for the people in this study. I begin with a general description of Portuguese migration to France, highlighting how the first and second generations are positioned relative to French and Portuguese societies. I proceed to describe Luso-descendants’ (LD) uses of French and Portuguese, and the social locations and personas evoked when they speak. After this general portrait, I describe the specific backgrounds of the twenty-three participants who participated in the study discussed in the rest of the book. These descriptions provide the context for the specific personas that LDs enact in each language. First Generation The Portuguese in France are a transnational community (Glick-Schiller, Basch,. and Szanton-Blanc 1992) for whom language is central in asserting and maintaining various kinds of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1991) across two national spaces (Brettell 1982; De Villanova 1988b; Gonçalves 1996; Koven 2004a; Lopes 1998). Various kinds of French and Portuguese linguistic competencies and performances allow speakers from first and second generations to assert and contest a range of sociocultural identities and life possibilities in France and Portugal. As the positions and experiences of the first generation are an important legacy relative to which LDs struggle to define themselves, below I discuss LDs’ parents’ trajectories. When LDs’ parents emigrated in the 1960s and 1970s, Portugal remained a largely agricultural, underindustrialized society (Marcadé 1988). Social and economic mobility was highly restricted. In the rural north and midlands of

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Portugal, access to anything beyond four years of education was limited. Before emigration, most LDs’ parents worked on small family-owned farms. Alongside internal migration away from the countryside to urban centers of Lisbon and Porto, emigration became one strategy for social mobility. In search of a better life, as much as 10% of the Portuguese population emigrated to urban centers in northern Europe recruiting foreign labor during the postwar economic growth that lasted until the 1970s (Brettell 1982). As France was reasserting itself as a cultural and economic center within Europe, urban France became the principal destination for these émigrés during this time period (Branco 1998; Rocha-Trindade 1984, 1998, 1999). As such, the specter of migration has continued to loom large in Portugal (Brettell 1993; Gonçalves 1996). Nearly half (45.7%) of the Portuguese community in France is located in Paris and the Parisian suburbs (Branco 1998). In 1990, there were 798,837 Portuguese citizens in France (Branco 1998). The Portuguese community, by nationality, is thus the largest immigrant population in France. They are one of the few contemporary examples of an extranational minority that comes from a country that was never a French colony (Cordeiro 1994). With no post-colonial tension, the Portuguese rarely come to mind in French discussions about immigrant communities. They have received relatively scant scholarly and popular attention in French discussions about immigration, compared to populations of Maghrebi origin. Indeed, the Portuguese in France are often referred to as the “invisible” community (Cordeiro 1994). For many, emigration was envisioned as a temporary strategy. Often, émigrés only intended to earn enough money in France to be able to return to live prosperously in Portugal. Although life in France was not to be permanent, many have stayed longer than originally intended—to earn more money, to let their children finish school, and, for some, because they have adapted ever more to life in France. For many émigrés, the final return becomes indefinitely deferred. However, even if based in France, most of these migrants circulate routinely between France and Portugal. As most (71.3%) spend their annual vacations in Portugal (de Villanova 1987), both parents and children spend at least one month a year there. Many have built their dream homes in their villages of origin (de Villanova, Leite, and Raposo 1994). Many from both generations plan to move to Portugal permanently, and/or have returned to live in Portugal for brief or even extended periods of time (15% according to de la Barre 1999). Furthermore, growing numbers of their LD children are moving to Portugal as adults (see below). The social status of Portuguese migrants cannot be defined in absolute terms, but must be evaluated relative to French and/or Portuguese national so-

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 39

cieties. Below I discuss the social statuses and identities migrants occupy and are believed to occupy in both France and Portugal. In urban France, most first-generation Portuguese have become part of the urban working class (Branco 1998). Men have stereotypically worked in civil construction, and women as maids, concierges, and janitors. Although many of the first generation may prefer urban working-class status to rural poverty, the first generation’s improvement in status may go unrecognized by others. The stereotype of the Portuguese immigrant is well-known among non-Portuguese, and widespread in popular culture (see Koven 2004a). This stereotype combines allusions to professions undertaken (e.g., concierge, maid for, women), working-class status, particular physical appearance, and use of Portugueseinfluenced French. Through such stereotypes, many nonmigrant French conflate Portuguese immigrants’ class identities in French society with Portugal’s status in Europe, seeing immigrants as occupying the lower rungs of social and international hierarchies. In Portugal, émigrés’ social status is more controversial. Through money earned in France and invested in Portugal, many émigrés are concerned with upward social mobility in Portugal (Marinho Antunes 1981). When they return to Portugal during their annual summer trips, many from the first generation believe themselves to have risen in Portuguese society. Given these frequent return trips to Portugal, there are many opportunities for them to display their relative social success and for nonmigrants to evaluate it. However, to many non-émigrés, émigrés’ status is ambiguous and disconcerting (Gonçalves 1996). The first-generation’s attempts at mobility are acknowledged, but contested. The stereotyped image of the ostentatious émigré, living in France and vacationing in Portugal, is well-known in Portugal. This stereotype involves the migrant exhibiting signs of Frenchness, as signs of illegitimately acquired social status (Gonçalves 1996), such as French styles of housing (de Villanova, Leite, and Raposo 1994), clothing, and speech. Why such ambivalence from nonmigrants? As the channels for access to various types of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984; Gonçalves 1996) have changed rapidly in the years since emigration, many nonmigrant Portuguese perceive émigrés’ controversial claims to improved social status through extranationally derived symbolic capital as illegitimate. Furthermore, émigrés left rural Salazarist Portugal before the major transformations that have taken place in Portugal over the past twenty-five years, such as the 1974 fall of the Salazarist regime, decolonization of Africa, rapid urbanization, greater access to schooling beyond the fourth grade, and Portugal’s incorporation into the European Union. Because many in Portugal associate these transformations with Portugal’s transition to modernity, non-émigrés may associate émigrés with a less “modern” era, remembered with ambivalence. Those who stayed in Portugal

40 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

often criticize émigrés for their backwardness and yet also critique their aspirations to upward mobility (Gonçalves 1996). With such binational life trajectories, migrants are forced to envision their social identities relative to the social landscapes of both France and Portugal. The first generation of Portuguese in France thus occupies multiple social positions in both French and Portuguese societies: in Portugal, rural villager from a previous era, turned upwardly mobile, returning or vacationing émigré. In France, urban, working-class immigrant. The first-generation’s positions in both societies become the backdrop against which their children define themselves. Second Generation Many of these migrants have had children, who either accompanied them to France as small children or were born in France. The LD children of these émigrés are heirs of historical, economic, social, cultural, and sociolinguistic circumstances that go beyond the confines of each national territory, referred to as Luso-descendants’ bipolarity of references (de Villanova 1986, 1988b; Martinho 1986; Oriol, Catani, Cordeiro, Hily, Munoz, Poinard, and RochaTrindade 1984; Rocha-Trindade 1986). Like their parents, Luso-descendants also strive to effect a social promotion, albeit of a different kind, across national borders between Portugal (where most go at least annually), and France. Various kinds of French and Portuguese linguistic competencies and performances allow LDs to assert and contest a range of sociocultural identities and life possibilities. However, how LD children fit into the Portuguese and French social structures remains controversial (Becker, Handman, and Iturra 1994; Branco 1986, 1998; de Villanova 1988b; Gonçalves 1996; Leandro 1998; Lopes 1998; Marinho Antunes 1981; Oriol 1988; Tribalat 1995). Relative to their parents, the second generation has at the very least experienced a social promotion in France and an economic promotion relative to their families back in Portugal. LDs’ ties to France are indisputable. LDs have been thoroughly immersed in French cultural and linguistic contexts, from a young age. Most of these Luso-descendants who have grown up in France during the 1970s and 1980s are part of the historically situated and heavily mediatized cohort of les jeunes (young people) that has known the socioeconomic “crisis” of economic recession, high unemployment, and cynicism that followed les 30 glorieuses, France’s postwar economic boom. Their patterns of dress, musical taste, consumption of popular culture, and speech practices (see below) are quite similar to those of their French peers (see Leandro 1995). As they have attended French public schools until at least the required age of fourteen, they surpass their parents educationally. Although there is much controversy over whether LDs aspire to and achieve the same professional

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goals as their French peers of nonimmigrant origin, there is at least significant social mobility within a given family (de Villanova 1988a). Some have argued that LDs are less likely than their French peers to complete the general French high school curriculum, and are more likely to leave school early, opting for lower-status vocational or technical training (Becker, Handman, and Iturra 1994; Todd 1995; Tribalat 1995). However, since the early 1980s, growing numbers of LDs are finishing the French high school leaving exam (the baccalauréat) and then going on to French university studies (Branco 1998). Branco (1998) notes a clear diversification in the kinds of jobs that the second generation is taking in France and an overall upward social mobility. In spite of the fact that these children have come of age in urban France, Luso-descendants’ ties to Portugal are as complex as those of their parents. Although they have attended French school, and usually have many French peers, virtually all spend annual summer vacations in their parents’ village of origin. Some have been periodically sent to live with extended family in Portugal for years at a time. Those who remained with their parents in France have grown up with their parents’ idea that time in France was limited, and that ultimately the entire family would “return” permanently to Portugal. Indeed, with these complex ties to both countries, many children of Portuguese migrants in urban France are concerned with integration not only in France, but also in Portugal. When they reach adulthood, many seek employment in both countries. As I discovered in my fieldwork (see also de la Barre 1997, 2004; Domingues 2000), more and more LDs are taking their French credentials and moving to urban Portugal. LDs seek to work in the professions for which they were trained in France—as French teachers, computer technicians, human-resource specialists, and so forth. Others are trying to continue their university education in Portugal. They hope to be accepted into the Portuguese urban middle class. During their regular sojourns, many seek out Portuguese romantic partners who have never emigrated. Portugal then becomes not only the country of origin and summer vacations, but the country in which LDs may try to imagine their future personal and professional lives and identities. This interest in moving to Portugal is not a marginal phenomenon. In a recent survey of LDs in France, 76.2% declared a desire to live in Portugal (de la Barre 1999). Perhaps facilitated by new laws that allow LDs to maintain dual citizenship, Portugal’s entry into the European Union, and cynicism in France about unemployment, LDs’ desire to work in urban Portugal or for a Portuguese company in France becomes a creative way to realize their parents’ aspirations to social advancement in Portugal. With their education and growing awareness of Europe in both symbolic and practical terms (de la Barre 1997, 2004), these LDs strive to imagine and lead lives in French and Portuguese societies quite different from what their parents could. In this context, LDs

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want their professional and social success ratified in both their parents’ society of origin and the society in which they grew up. As one member of a LD organization put it, in an interview with Le Point, “It’s no longer enough to dance in a folklore group to satisfy one’s Portuguese identity. That identity must be recognized in French and Portuguese public space. The opportunities to use one’s double culture and double competence must be the same in France and in Portugal” (Guichard 1998:80). Several major bureaucratic institutions, including the Portuguese embassy in Paris, the Franco-Portuguese chamber of commerce in Lisbon, and LD clubs, have virtually taken on the role of parttime employment agencies, meeting hundreds of LDs every year who seek employment in Portugal. One club reports that, from a sample of six hundred LD CVs, 37% of their requests for placement advice came from people seeking jobs in Portugal, 36% from people who would like to work in a Portuguese context in France, and 27% who would willingly work in either country. Nonmigrant Portuguese are often eager to assess the success of these LDs, relative to others in France and in Portugal.2 This complex, often confusing, binationally oriented mixture of life hopes and experiences profoundly affects Luso-descendants’ language practices and senses of cultural identity. Language and Identity Because of their constant transnational movements, and efforts to participate in both French and Portuguese societies, LDs’ verbal repertoires and language attitudes are quite complex. Most have grown up bilingual. However, the French and Portuguese spoken by these bilinguals are not monolithic entities. Luso-descendants use and recognize a range of socially meaningful identityindexing registers in both languages. Below, we will see that although many Luso-descendants are fluent speakers of both languages, the varieties of each language they command are not socially equivalent. As a result of this difference, Luso-descendants have access to nonequivalent ranges and kinds of identities in each language. Although they may participate in bilingual speech practices with others who also speak their two languages, they also interact with French and Portuguese monolinguals on a regular basis in both countries, in both peer groups and more formal settings. Portuguese cannot therefore be described as merely a migrant community’s in-group code of solidarity, and French the dominant language of the host society. Indeed, LDs live in regimes of monoglot standard (Silverstein 1996a) entrenched in both French and Portuguese societies, where they are regularly evaluated and regularly evaluate their own competencies in both languages relative to monolingual norms (Koven 2004a). LDs realize that both Portuguese and French are standardized languages of European nationstates with gradiently prestigious and stigmatized varieties, the mastery of which positions speakers in the social hierarchies of both societies. Below I

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 43

describe the social locations and personas evoked by LDs’ speech in their two languages. French Repertoires and Identities LDs typically control a range of written and oral registers in French. Through the French educational system, all have been exposed to standard French linguistic practices and ideologies. In peer groups of LDs, an age-graded vernacular variety of French is the matrix language, similar to children of immigrants in Northern Europe (Auer 1995; Dabène and Moore 1995; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003). That is, as most have had many French-speaking peers during the course of the school year, their French typically sounds like that of their French monolingual peers. There is thus nothing about LDs’ French that “gives them away” as anything other than native speakers of French.3 During my fieldwork, I heard many French people (not of Portuguese origin) express surprise at how “well” particular LDs spoke French, astonished to hear a voice no different from that of any other young adult who had grown up in France. In this respect, their French distinguishes them from the stereotypes associated with their parents’ Portuguese-influenced French (see Koven 2004a). Overall, in French contexts, LDs have enjoyed upward social mobility relative to their parents. Their capacity to speak monolingual-like French has often been instrumental in their differentiation from their parents and in their participation in French life. They are thus exposed to and speak a range of different kinds of French. Some may speak French in a way that also marks them as working-class. As was described above, they belong to the same sociohistorical cohort and participate in many of the same sociolinguistic practices as their non-Portuguese peers. “Youthfulness” is one dimension of the persona that their French speech evokes, with their use of contemporary versions of age-graded “young” (Boyer 1997) Parisian and suburban colloquial French. “Young” is a term adopted by analysts and participants alike. To participants, to say of a speaker that he or she sounds jeune, typically means not only that he or she is part of a socially constructed generational category (Morford 1997) or age-cohort; “young” also has characterological connotations of being easygoing, nonhierarchical, and urban. It means definitively not being caught up in a bourgeois lifestyle to which it is opposed. On the other end of the continuum, too much jeune speech could make the speaker sound like a banlieusard (a suburbanite), the stereotyped image of a socially undesirable, disrespectful youth on the fringes of urban French life, living in a cité (housing project). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe all the formal features associated with these ethnosociolinguistic terms; I simply sketch a range of sociolinguistic images through which Luso-descendants can inhabit the identities also assumable by nonPortuguese youths in France.

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Portuguese Linguistic Repertoires and Identities For many Luso-descendants, Portuguese was their first language, and often remains the language their parents speak around them and to them at home. For many in Portugal and the diaspora, Portuguese is believed to be an inherited language that Portuguese parents have a duty to transmit to their children. The Portuguese have become among the most ardent supporters of making “language of origin” instruction available through the official channels of the French public school system. Although the children may spend considerable time in French monolingual contexts, the entire family usually has an investment in the children’s maintenance and cultivation of Portuguese language skills—to allow annual reunion with family and friends in Portugal and, ultimately, to facilitate successful reintegration into full-time life in Portugal. In other words, LDs and their parents are often quite committed to LDs’ bilingualism. What type of Portuguese counts in this bilingualism? As stated above, even if they do not master it, LDs are frequently aware of the power of monolingual-sounding standard Portuguese. Although many LDs may be aware of speaking “the Portuguese of their parents,” they recognize the social value of Portuguese as a monolingual standard language that should be spoken in particular ways. Even among LDs who do not aspire to move to Portugal, LDs frequently remain linguistically insecure about their Portuguese, aware of speaking “good” or “bad” Portuguese. With variable success, many LDs strive for monolingual-like skill in both languages (Koven 2004a, 2004b). As one LD reported, “It’s true that Portuguese, if I could master it like PortuguesePortuguese people [in Portugal], I’d be really happy, y’know.” Many aim to speak like “people from over there, the Portuguese from Portugal.” Many LDs are pleased when they “pass” in Portugal as never having emigrated, in other words, as monolingual Portuguese. LDs may thus not necessarily value bilingualism, if it detracts from monolingual-like performances (Koven 2004a). Furthermore, because Luso-descendants are aware that each language is the one and only native tongue for many of their peers in France and Portugal, many also believe that they should be able to use each language to cover their entire range of social activities and domains—that each language is supposed to be an autonomous system that can meet all the social needs of its speaker, sufficient for professional, intimate, familial, and peer contexts. In this respect, regardless of mastery, speakers believe they should be able to function with the register range of French and Portuguese monolinguals. Indeed, as they are often in monolingual contexts, they often find themselves restricted to the expressive resources of only one of their two languages. Although it might seem obvious that LDs would encounter dominant French ideologies of monoglot-standard, one might wonder in what contexts they have encountered dominant Portuguese ideologies. They encounter the

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pressures of monoglot standard Portuguese in a number of contexts in Portugal and in France. In France, LDs are likely to meet speakers from urban middleclass Portugal through venues often backed by institutions in Portugal. They may interact with civil servants at the Portuguese embassy in Paris, listen to the Portuguese-language radio station that broadcasts programs made in France and in Portugal, or watch Portuguese satellite television, RTPI. Portuguese classrooms in France are another very important site where LDs are oriented to standard Portuguese. According to de la Barre (1999), 89% of LDs have had formal Portuguese instruction in France. Many families enroll their LD children in Portuguese courses both within and outside the French educational system in anticipation of a future, permanent return to Portugal. Many of the teachers of Portuguese courses (in preuniversity and university settings) are sent directly from Portugal, and come from a more prosperous social background in Portugal than LDs’ parents. Through these multiple channels, LDs are exposed to the reality, pressures, and potential rewards of standard Portuguese, beyond that spoken in their homes. Therefore, despite their parents’ more humble origins, many aspire to sound like urban middle-class speakers in both languages. In addition to standard Portuguese, during their annual trips to Portugal, they also regularly encounter more colloquial kinds of Portuguese, as spoken in contemporary Portugal by family and peers who have remained in Portugal (de Villanova 1987, 1988b). They are thus regularly exposed to a range of vernacular and more formal ways of speaking Portuguese, as spoken by monolingual Portuguese. Through these multiple channels, Luso-descendants hear multiple kinds of monolingual Portuguese beyond that spoken in their homes. However, although LDs are exposed to contemporary versions of monolingual Portuguese, as stated above, they have often inherited their parents’ sociolinguistic legacy. Whereas they are clearly participants in French youth culture and its associated speech practices, this is usually not the case in Portuguese. The Portuguese spoken by LDs often bears the traces of the parents’ social origins as rural, regional, lower socioeconomic status, and French-influenced. This speech also evokes the relatively little formal education LDs’ parents received, as well as marking their connection to a cohort potentially considered archaic, one that came of age before many recent transformations in Portuguese society. As a sociolinguistic “package,” therefore, LDs’ speech evokes class, region, migration, and sociohistorical era. Those in Portugal who have never emigrated are very sensitive to these identity markers in LDs’ Portuguese. In response to LDs’ speech, other Portuguese speakers are often able to summon up elaborate images of the speakers’ origins. One directly commented on how a particular LD seemed profoundly different in his two, languages by reporting that, “When I heard him speak Portuguese, he seemed like a different person. Whereas in French he’d always

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seemed normal and fairly educated, in Portuguese he seemed like an ignorant hick.” Below I discuss in more detail two important social images evoked in LDs’ speech—that associated with French influence and that with “old-fashioned” Portuguese. The traces of French influence on LDs’ Portuguese, from subtle morphophonetic influence to full-blown code-switching, are sometimes deridingly called frantuguês or emigrês (Correia 1994; Dias 1989; Koven 2004a; de Villanova 1988b; Sanches 1989) by both émigré and non-émigré Portuguese. When they and their parents return to Portugal in the summer, they are often criticized for mixing in French words. This mixing is often read by non-émigrés as the sign of illegitimate social climbing (Gonçalves 1996; Koven 2004a). Thus, in Portuguese, the French influence in LDs’ speech may evoke the persona of the once rural “hick” turned émigré. LDs’ speech also may evoke a particular set of images of prerevolutionary, rural Portugal. Émigrés’ and Luso-descendants’ Portuguese is thus often described by those remaining in Portugal as “old-fashioned,” like that of “old people in the country.” Some of this archaic feel may come from nonstandard phonetically marked variants of Portuguese, such as the use of /b/ instead of the now standard /v/, and pronunciation of /e/ instead of /ε/ (see Cunha and Cintra 1985). Other divergences between contemporary, urban, middle-class usage and that spoken in émigré families include forms of address. Some émigrés from the rural north may still use such forms such as vós or vossa mercê, now considered archaic in urban centers. This use of “old-fashioned” Portuguese can literally make the user seem older. When I have had LDs react to other LDs’ speech in each language (see chapter 7), they have frequently imagined the same speaker to be older in Portuguese than in French. In one instance, the same speaker seemed to several listeners to be forty in Portuguese, and to be in her late teens in French. One LD explained to me why other second-generation Portuguese migrants might sound older in Portuguese than their chronological age in the following way. “Given that they [Luso-descendants] use the language of their parents, and that it’s more a language of adults, necessarily, you’d think they were older.” Another one commented, “They [Luso-descendants] all have a tendency . . . in French to have a younger language, more of their age, y’know, that belongs to them, instead of the Portuguese; it’s a kind of language that they borrow . . . Most had a language, y’know, that they learned from their parents. I’d say it’s an old-fashioned Portuguese, that’s not from today.” Although LDs’ verbal demeanor evokes youthfulness in French, in Portugal, despite their chronological age, their speech evokes the “older” generation of their parents. This “oldness” may also be interpreted as not only chronological age, but as an orientation to the past. Many in Portugal have commented to me that

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both LDs and their parents seem to be suspended in the pre-revolutionary era. As one non-émigré Portuguese from the urban Portuguese middle class said to me about Luso-descendants, “They have a hard time accepting that they come from backward, medieval backgrounds.” Émigrés and their children thus evoke, for those remaining in Portugal, the antithesis of Portuguese modernity. Luso-descendants may comment on this as well: When you go to Portugal, you can tell apart the Portuguese from over there and the émigrés who are on vacation. You can see the difference . . . there’s a lag . . . In fact I have the impression that we are a little outside of time, and then outside of national borders, but I dunno, we are in another space, we’re in émigré space . . . It’s Portuguese people who, who well, left their country, and in leaving, they left everything behind them, and I dunno, they didn’t follow the evolution.

Although many LDs look up to and want to emulate the speech of urban young people in Portugal, most know that they may not be as easily recognized as “young” in Portuguese. It is thus often very hard for Luso-descendants to distinguish themselves from the “old” image associated with their parents. Luso-descendants are thus exposed to a range of different socially marked ways of speaking Portuguese, from urban standard to rural, colloquial, and archaic. However, their productive control of the kinds of Portuguese spoken outside of their homes is often variable. Although many may try to speak more like their non-émigré peers in Portugal or like their urban Portuguese teachers, most continue to speak a Portuguese that reveals their families’ rural, lowerclass, émigré origins, from a historical era considered bygone. Old and/or Young in French and Portuguese From this discussion, we see the nonequivalent sets of sociolinguistic resources and associated personas summoned up when LDs speak their two languages. To a certain extent, LDs are aware of the differently aged personas evoked by their Portuguese and French. In French contexts, as Portuguese is the language most LDs’ first-generation parents speak, LDs may also think of it to some extent as the language of “old people” and French the language of “young people.” If they are in a bilingual or French-only setting, Portuguese can be designated as more their elders’ language, and less theirs. LDs can avoid being old-fashioned by making French the vehicle of their youthfulness. By critiquing the backwardness/old-fashionedness of both their parents’ Portuguese and the old-fashionedness it evokes, they may assert their own hipness. In the two excerpts below from a conversation among three Luso-descendant women and myself, one can see how these different language-linked personas are evoked in LDs’ French and Portuguese. LDs’ awareness of the dif-

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ferent personas and values associated with their French and Portuguese can sometimes be seen in how speakers narrate stories about interactions with their parents. LDs will often quote their parents in Portuguese and themselves in French.4 The women in this conversation were friends, and university students (Julia, Vanessa, and Susana). We were in my apartment, eating and talking, when I recorded them. The speakers regularly use Portuguese to present the voice of Portuguese backward social norms and French to present their own more youthful, modern perspectives. The three women talk very critically and mockingly about old-fashioned Portuguese norms for behavior. Julia (J) speaks more than the other two, and she tells multiple stories of personal experience that present “old” Portuguese models of ideal female comportment while depicting herself at the same time as a “modern, liberated” young woman who challenges such notions. In addition to the conventions described in the front matter, quotations in Portuguese have been underlined and quotations in French have been italicized. Excerpt 3.1 showing quotation of “old-fashioned” others in Portuguese and “modern” selves in French. Original languages

English translation

1

J: . . toutes les vacances, on se la paie.

J: . . every vacation, we have to deal with her.

2

p’tain, et puis c’était comme ↑ci fais pas ↑ci fais pas↑ça, t’habille pas comm’ci, t’habille pas comm’ ↑ça.

fuck, and then it was like↑ this, don’t do↑ this don’t do↑ that, don’t dress like this, don’t dress like↑ that.

3

putain. un ↑coup, ((breath)) oh je euh c’était euh, y a y a 2 ans quand chuis partie avec mon frère.

fuck. ↑once, ((breath)) oh, I uh it was uh, it was it was two years ago when I went with my brother.

4

donc euh j’étais euh chez ma cou↑sine. et y a eu a São Memede, sozinha à pé. j’allais faire chais pas quoi, bon, je pouvais y aller à pied, bon. et et alors j’mets mon walkman, t’sais, j’étais en salopette et tout, tee shirt t’ sais euh, okay,=

so I was at my ↑cousin’s. and there was to São Memede, alone on foot. I was gonna do, I dunno what, okay, I could go there on foot, okay. and and so I put on my walkman, y’know, I was in overalls an’ everything, t-shirt, y’know,=

5

V: = ouais=

V: = yeah =

6

J: = sac à dos [((unclear))

J : = backpack [((unclear))

7

S:

S:

[((unclear))]

[((unclear))]

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 49

8

J: et tout, e’ m’ fait euh (.) “vais com isso nas orelhas p’a p’ra rua?” j’fais, “ben oui (.)”

J: an’everything, and she’s like uh (.) “you’re going out into into the street with that in your ears?” I’m like, “well yeah(.)”

9

S: ((giggle))

S: ((giggle))

10

J: t’sais, je la r’garde =

J: y’know, I look at her =

11

V: = ben et alors

V: = well so what

12

J: (unclear) e’ m’fait “↑AH mas isso não se ↑FAZ.” j’fais euh (.) “ça va pas [↑là?”

J: (unclear) she’s like, “↑OH but one doesn’t/you don’t ↑DO that.” I’m like (.) “what’s ↑wrong with [you?”

13

V:[hhhh

V:

14

J: et ↑toc toc hein? =

J: and ↑hello, eh? =

15

V:= hhhhh

V: = hhhhh

16

J: e’ fait “oh, isso não é bem.” j’ fais “ah, esteja calada.”

J: she’s like, “oh, that’s not good.” I’m like “oh, be quiet.”

17

J: chuis partie. el’ m’a poussé la main. e’me fait, “já sabes, a tu- tua mãe de dea minha mãe, a tua mãe ainda está nonos tempos antigos.”

J: I left. she pushed my hand. she’s like, “you know, your your mother -my mother, your mother is still in the olden days.”

18

J: je fais, “mais attends. diz-me lá onde ‘stá o ma. Tu não escutas, sabes que (unclear) já é (unclear)? ”

19

V: = ben ouais

J: I’m like, “but wait. tell me what the problem is. You don’t /shouldn’t listen, do you know that (unclear) it’s (unclear)?” V: = well yeah

20

J: mais elle elle a un problème celle là (.)

J: but that one’s got a real problem (.)

21

V: i’sont arriérés.

V: they’re backwards.

[hhhh

In this story, Julia (J) describes how she was off on a long walk in rural Portugal, dressed in an outfit (overalls, T-shirt, backpack, Walkman) that any young student in France would find completely normal (section 4). Susana (S) confirms this with her “ouais” (section 5)—she doesn’t seem to find Julia’s description of her outfit shocking, as she encourages Julia to continue her story. In section 8, Julia then quotes the shocked reaction of her Portuguese aunt in Portuguese, and her own French retort to her aunt. In section 11, Vanessa (V) backs up Julia’s “well yeah,” with her “well so what,” showing that she agrees with Julia that she was doing nothing abnormal. Julia continues her story of

50 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

her interchange with her aunt, who, appalled, yells out in Portuguese the rules of social conventions. Julia quotes herself then talking back to her aunt in French, telling her aunt that she’s a bit crazy. In section 13, we see that this quoted exchange elicits laughter from Vanessa, as Julia continues her quoted French speech to her aunt, implying that her aunt’s views are crazy. Julia again quotes her aunt in Portuguese. Julia then quotes herself talking back to her aunt this one time in Portuguese. In section 17, Julia quotes her aunt telling her that her mother would disapprove, because she’s still in the olden days (nos tempos antigos). In section 18, Julia quotes herself beginning in French, then in Portuguese, saying that she really doesn’t understand the problem her aunt has with the Walkman. Vanessa backs her up, making explicit the point that was indexed throughout the whole story, that “they” are backward—those old Portuguese types and their old-fashioned ideas. Excerpt 3.2 showing quotation of “old-fashioned” others in Portuguese and “modern” selves in French.

1

2 3 4 5

6

7

8

Original language V: c’est du style, euh, ouais “vem ela, antes de vir pra’qui e lá, vais a ver como é que ela se veste. vais a ver.” S: ah ça ((unclear)) V: ouai(h)s J: vous l’avez pas entendu ça déjà? (.) J: ma mère, (.) [t’sais], l’autre jour V: [ouais] J: j’ve j’vais à, j’ voyais un short, ah je fais, “ah, il est mignon le short.” en jean et tout (.) J: “vais meter isso depois de ‘tares casado?” je dis, “ben, alors?” = S: = hhhhh J: à ton choix (.) “oh mas depois de ‘tares casado, não podes.” J’fais, “mais arrête!” S: une fois, mais. c’est ça. une fois qu’ t’es mariée, J: faut plus t’habiller [comm’ avant S: [tu dois, va ranger tes minijupes. J: j’fais à ma mère, j’fais, = S: = (unclear) [genoux M: [c’est quoi le problème

English translation V: it’s like, uh, yeah, “here she comes, before coming here and there, look at how she’s dressed. you’re going to see.” S: for sure ((unclear)) V: yea(h) J: you guys haven’t heard that before? (.) J: my mother (.) [y’know], the other day V: [yeah.] J: I g- I go to-, I saw a pair of shorts, oh I’m like, “Oh those shorts are cute.” in denim and everything (.) J: “you’re going to wear those after you get married?” I say, “yeah, and so?”= S: = hhhhh J: your choice (.) “oh but after you’re married, you can’t.” I’m like, “stop it!” S: once , but. that’s it. once you’re married, J: can’t dress anymore [like before S: [you have to, go put away your miniskirts. J: I go to my mother, I’m like,= S: = (unclear) [knees M: [ what’s the problem

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 51

J: “oh, mas vais ‘tar com os panos (unclear.)” j’fais, “non, mais t’es tarrée toi. ça va pas la tête.”

J: “oh, but you’ll have to wear rags (unclear).” I’m like, “no, but you’re retarded. what’s wrong with you.”

This second excerpt begins with Vanessa quoting a generic Portuguese perspective that criticizes how LD women dress when they come to Portugal. Julia then tells a story about clothes-shopping with her mother. She quotes herself in French, admiring an outfit she seems to deem appropriate for any young woman in France. She proceeds to quote her mother in Portuguese telling her that she can’t possibly wear such clothing once she is married. Both times, Julia follows these quoted performances of her old-fashioned Portuguese mother, with her own quoted retorts in French,:“ben, alors” (well, so what) and ”mais arête!” (Stop it!). When she quotes her mother telling her in Portuguese that she’ll have to wear rags once married, Julia’s message is loud and clear in her quotation of her retort in French “I’m like, ‘No, but you’re retarded. what’s wrong with you.’ ” The Portuguese-speaking voice of female decorum is old-fashioned and “retarded.” Within the context of these stories, backward social proscriptions and calls for appropriateness are typically put in the mouths of Portuguese female elders in Portuguese. Most of the quoted utterances that appear in Portuguese comment on the inappropriateness of LDs’ behavior. Most of these young women’s quoted utterances of themselves appear in French, as retorts to their elders. By and large, Julia’s retorts are rendered in “young person’s French,” as she asserts her right to go out, dress, and generally do as she pleases. The register used in these retorts evokes the persona of rebellious, young adults, who demand their “freedom” and “rights.” Indeed, when I played this conversation to another Luso-descendant and asked for her interpretation of what the recorded speaker wanted to convey, she replied, “That she’s liberated.” In this way, for these LD women, Portuguese is the language of the first generation’s (gendered) proscriptions, whereas French is the language of autonomy and of legitimate rupture and forward-thinking departure from the first generation’s norms. In Bakhtinian (1981) terms, these speakers look at one language from the perspective of another, looking upon old Portuguese through young French. By juxtaposing the two languages indexically associated with each presented way of dressing, thinking, and speaking, these LD speakers critique Portuguese old-fashionedness through the voice of French modernity. Their contrasting presentations of themselves and others are only possible because of the participants’ implicit understandings of the socially semiotic (socially indexical and socially iconic) value of these different ways of speaking.

52 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

How to Be Youthful while Using “Old-fashioned” Portuguese If, for these speakers, Portuguese is regularly associated with backwardness and old-fashionedness, the second generation might be expected to eventually shift ever more to French, and its more positively evoked stereotypes of youth and modernity,5 by a socially motivated process of language change, which authors such as Gal (1979), Hill and Hill (1986), Kulick (1992), and Silverstein (1985/1995b) have described. However, as described above, LDs often participate in Portuguese monolingual or dominant contexts, where they must use Portuguese. In such contexts, the relationships among language, age, and generation quickly become more complex, as Portuguese can then no longer only be the language in which they quote their backward parents. In such contexts, despite whatever socially indexical cues their Portuguese evokes about the old-fashionedness of its users, LDs have no alternative but to use this language as their own. In Portuguese monolingual settings, they may be restricted to the sociolinguistic resources and associated personas accessible to them in Portuguese. Summary of Languages and Identities for LDs As Blommaert argues (2003, 2005), in the era of globalization, even as people literally travel more easily and frequently across the globe, their speech and the identities it indexes may not travel as readily. The preceding examples showed some ways in which LDs identities may not travel or translate well, as they move between French and Portuguese contexts. Equivalent identities and the sociolinguistic resources that index them may not be available to LDs. The nonequivalent socially indexed identities that these women’s ways of speaking evoke and invoke present them with different possibilities and ranges of who they can and cannot easily be in French and Portuguese/France and Portugal. Their usage of each language presents them with particular sets of semiotic resources through which they become able (or unable) to perform local personas. In the material presented in this chapter, we see that Luso-descendants are more than the bearers of two monolithic national cultures as embodied in two monolithic languages. Having described their complex, linguistically mediated identities, I will therefore not be making claims about the “French selves” versus “Portuguese selves,” where each language is a monolithic, shared code for two societies of speakers that fall neatly within the boundaries of two nationstates. These French-Portuguese bilinguals occupy a range of specific social locations within and between French and Portuguese societies, and have verbal repertoires more complex than just the combination of standard Portuguese and standard French. Although most Luso-descendants are fluent speakers of both languages, the social locations their speech communicates are not socially equivalent. They are in contact with and produce a whole range of socially

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 53

patterned, identity-producing ways of speaking French and Portuguese. In Portuguese, their most colloquial speech comes across as rural, old-fashioned, and touched by migration; in French, their most colloquial speech comes across as youthful and urban/suburban. As we will see, these different strands of identity are relevant to the different kinds of personas summoned up for people in their colloquial speech in each language. Participants in the Current Study, Relative to More General LD Norms Having provided a general sociolinguistic portrait of LDs in French and Portuguese contexts, I now present information about the specific participants in the current study. Please see appendix B for demographic information on each participant.6 Given the relatively small sample size, I focus in-depth on a relatively homogeneous group of speakers of only women. The twenty-three women in this study are relatively balanced Luso-descendant bilinguals who spend a good deal of time in French and Portuguese bilingual and monolingual contexts. Like the LDs described above, their relationships to French and Portuguese have taken shape in the context of their family’s circulation between France and Portugal. Both languages therefore play a vital role in how these women live and plan their lives in these two societies. The twenty-three women in this study can therefore be situated relative to the larger population of LDs in France. Participants ranged in age between eighteen and twenty-four, born between 1971 and 1977. Their families’ regions of origins in Portugal are similar to those found in the Portuguese émigré community. Nine were from the northeastern region of Trás-os-Montes. Seven were from the northwestern region of Minho, near the cities of Braga and Porto. Seven were from more southern areas, either near Lisbon, or Pombal, or the Alentejo. All were very aware of their parents’ social status and sociolinguistic trajectories. The parents of participants in this study came, for the most part, from rural Portugal. They emigrated as young adults to urban France with the hopes of improving their economic lot. In Portugal, many had worked on small family-owned farms. Few had more than four years of formal schooling. Some had none at all. Most learned French through immersion. The women worked as maids or building concierges, the men often in factory or civil construction jobs, usually with other working-class immigrants. All the LDs in this study were living in Paris or neighboring suburbs at the time of data collection. Twelve of the participants were born and raised in France, in Paris or nearby suburbs. Trips to Portugal occurred during summer and other vacations. The other eleven had spent at least four years of their childhood before puberty living in Portugal. Six of these were born in Portugal and subsequently came to live in France during early or middle childhood. Five experienced multiple back-and-forth moves during their childhoods—

54 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

perhaps born in France, then accompanying their parents back to Portugal for several years during an attempt at permanent return migration, and later returning to France when their parents decided to relocate again. Some were sent to live with family in Portugal for several years while their parents became better established in France. Among this group, many had their schooling interrupted, changing school systems and peer languages multiple times. All of the participants aspired to higher-status jobs than their parents had held. Relative to their families of origin, all twenty-three have experienced social mobility, which has at times been recognized with difficulty and unequally in French and Portuguese contexts. It is noteworthy that all the participants are pursuing university level studies, often capitalizing on their Portuguese to help them in this pursuit. They were students in an array of subjects from Portuguese literature and civilization, to international relations, to economics. These women are not necessarily representative of all LDs, with their pursuit of university degrees, but are nonetheless clearly locatable as part of the “second generation” of Portuguese in France. Although these women’s explicit senses of cultural identity may be at odds with the multiplicity and ambiguity of their everyday experiences, I did ask participants to tell me whether they considered themselves to be Portuguese or French. Most reported feeling that they were both French and Portuguese but realized that others often categorize them as either one or the other. Typically they report being made to feel Portuguese in France and French in Portugal. Most have dual citizenship, and a handful have only Portuguese. None in the sample had only French citizenship. Many talked about wanting to be perceived as Portuguese in Portugal, sometimes expressing a desire to be only Portuguese. Some said that their “heart” was Portuguese, but that their “mind” and “education” were French. From this we see some variability in participants’ history of contact with life in Portugal. Some have spent only summers in Portugal, whereas others spent entire years of their childhood fully integrated into everyday life. Despite this diversity, most had spent their adolescence in France. No discernible, systematic differences in language practices were evident between those who had lived in Portugal full-time and those who had only lived there during summer months. By the time of the interviews, although all were relatively balanced bilinguals, they were for the most part somewhat French dominant. With regard to their French and Portuguese language use, their French is typically indistinguishable from that of French monolinguals of similar socioeconomic background. All maintained that French was “easier” for them and that they did not believe, nor were they concerned, that they had any Portuguese influence in their French. Although many remembered initial struggles learning French as children, none expressed any concern or current insecurity about the “nativeness” of their French. On the other hand, even if their lan-

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 55

guage dominance may have switched throughout their respective childhoods, sometimes more than once, they all ended up somewhat French-dominant by early adulthood. Portuguese continues to play a role in their lives in both countries, as most spend at least one month annually in Portugal. Out of the twenty-three, a number (6) have monolingual Portuguese boyfriends, with whom they have had to speak only Portuguese. Six were romantically involved with another Luso-descendant. Only three were involved with French boyfriends. Most stated that they wanted to raise their children bilingually. Many also had concrete plans to work in Portugal or to use Portuguese in their professional lives. A large number (17) of the participants wanted to relocate to Portugal as adults. The six who were less sure that they wanted to move to Portugal still wanted a profession that would make use of their Portuguese, such as teaching Portuguese in France, or working for a Portuguese company.7 In this way, most anticipated continuing to speak Portuguese in their personal and professional lives. In terms of their use of different registers of French and Portuguese, although these LDs may not have the same ease and self-confidence in both languages, they are able to at least recognize, if not produce, the formal, standard registers required in interactions with strangers in service encounters, and in educational settings. Many can recognize and produce the kinds of solidary, yet respectful usage appropriate to conversing with older kin, or can use the informal speech for spending time with immediate family members. Many are able to avoid offending the storekeeper by not speaking to him as a kinsman. Nevertheless, most expressed concern about using very formal Portuguese appropriately, such as writing letters, speaking to strangers on the phone, or shopping. All had taken formal Portuguese courses in France, many studying it up through the high school leaving exam and in university. Many credited this formal instruction with “cleaning up” their Portuguese—purging it of ruralisms, signs of lower socioeconomic status, and French. Some also expressed concern about using colloquial language used by their age contemporaries in Portugal. Their colloquial language reflects that used by their parents’ generation—marked for its old-fashionedness and rurality, and perhaps also its influence with French. Most expressed anxiety that French influences their Portuguese—that they “mix” French into Portuguese. Nevertheless, all strove to speak Portuguese like their monolingual peers in urban Portugal. In other words, the LDs in this study are familiar with, recognize, and (perhaps somewhat less reliably) produce “appropriate” usages across a variety of formal and informal contexts in France and Portugal. However, although these Luso-descendants may master a range of more and less formal and informal registers in both languages, they maneuver and shift creatively among them less in Portuguese than in French. In Portuguese, Luso-descendants may strive to and even be able to produce the appropriate,

56 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

unmarked form. In French, however, speakers not only master a range of registers to cover a range of types of formal and informal social interactions, they juxtapose and shift among different registers of French for dramatic effect, engaging in what has been variously called use of marked speech (Myers-Scotton 1993, 1998a, 1998b, 2000/1988), initiative shifts (Bell 1984), metaphorical switches (Blom and Gumperz 1972), or creative indexicals (Silverstein 1992, 1995,1976/1995). They can thus produce not only the possible unmarked forms for a range of social situations, but they also play with and intersperse strategically chosen marked forms. Therefore, what distinguishes these Luso-descendants’ sociolinguistic practice in their two languages is not only the social locations their speech indexes (rural, uneducated, émigré versus(sub)urban, working-class, upwardly mobile), but the ways in which they manipulate Portuguese and French within-language register variation. In essence, these different sociolinguistic competencies and practices point to their range and flexibility of possible sociolinguistically mediated self-presentations. This differential use of register shifting in both languages may have effects on the kinds of strategic identities Luso-descendants can claim and assume in French and Portuguese sociolinguistic contexts. In her discussions of language and identity, Barbara Johnstone has argued against a deterministic view of the relationship between social identity and language use, in which scholars have treated demographic variables as static forces that cause speakers to adopt a particular way of speaking (Johnstone 1996, 1997a, 1997b). In her work, Johnstone has claimed that part of speakers’ sense of distinctive individuality emerges from creative, strategic blendings of socially meaningful registers. Indeed in French contexts, this may be an apt description of how Luso-descendants use sociolinguistic variation. However, in Portuguese, speakers are more sociolinguistically constrained and restrained. Luso-descendants may be able to produce an unmarked form, but may be less likely to strategically produce creatively marked forms. These speakers may thus not have equivalent degrees of freedom in their sociolinguistic presentations of self in French and Portuguese sociolinguistic contexts. In this respect, they not only project different personas and social origins in their two languages, they also are better able to use language to manipulate and shift among multiple personas in French in the same stretch of discourse. Therefore, in monolingual settings speakers do not accomplish the same kinds of sociolinguistic identity work in each language. With this sociolinguistic background about Luso-descendants in general and the participants in this study, we turn to in the next chapter the more controlled procedures in which these women participated. 1 A full treatment of Portuguese migration is beyond the scope of this chapter. This discussion focuses only on those elements of Portuguese migration directly relevant to the current study. See (Brettell 1982; Cordeiro 1984, 1994; Cunha 1988; de la Barre 1997; de Villanova, Leite,

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS 57

and Raposo 1994; Leandro 1995, 1998; Neto 1985; Oriol, Catani, Cordeiro, Hily, Munoz, Poinard, Rocha-Trindade 1984; Branco 1986, 1998; Rocha-Trindade 1999; Rocha-Trindade and Raveau 1998; Trindade 1986) for more extensive discussions. For focus on sociolinguistic issues related to this population, see (Carreira 1983, 1989, 1990, 1991; Correia 1994; Deprez 1999; de Matos 1991; de Villanova 1987, 1988a, 1988b; Dias 1989; Koven 2004a; Sanches 1989; Terra 2000; Tomé and Carreira 1994). 2 It is somewhat more difficult for the analyst to define LDs’ social mobility in Portugal in absolute terms. In terms of “objective” criteria, such as income, or educational level, Portugal still lags behind France in terms of average revenue and years of schooling, despite recent improvements. Compared to which segment of the population should they be compared? Their parents’ pre-emigration status? The status of their cousins and other young adults who never emigrated? 3 There are ways in which speakers may deliberately, strategically integrate Portuguese into French, in very specific contexts. See Koven (2004a). 4 See Koven (2001) for a review of scholarship that discusses the relationship between reported speech and code-switching. Based on a review of this scholarship and an empirical study, I argue that bilinguals may code-switch to report speech not necessarily out of a concern to accurately replay the language each party may have originally used, but to capture the social voices that each language embodies for these speakers. 5 See Androutsopoulous and Georgakopoulou (2003) for rich discussions of the discursive construction and performance of “youth” in a variety of European contexts. 6 See chapters 8 and 9 for indepth discussion of the backgrounds and experiences of two LD women, Teresa and Isabel. 7 At the time of the interviews, most of these women had yet to begin their careers or families. These are aspirations. However, I have maintained contact with many of them, and can report that many of these aspirations were realized. Of the fourteen from whom I have received updates, eight have moved to Portugal, and six remain in France. Many have indeed married and begun families, often with other Luso-descendants or people from Portugal.

PART II BILINGUALS’ IDENTITY PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER 4 BILINGUALS’ REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE IMPACT OF TWO LANGUAGES ON CONTEXT AND SELF

Bilinguals’ explicit reflections on who they are and how they feel in each language yield insight into the affective and psychological effects of bilingualism. Along with analysis of their discursive practices in each language (chapter 5 and 6), and a report of how others perceive them in each language (chapter 7), participants’ self-reports of their language-based subjective experiences are one of three complementary perspectives I take up in this book. In this chapter, I examine how French-Portuguese bilinguals themselves report their subjective experiences of using each language, that is, how they talk about the impact of their two languages on their experiences of self, language, and context. If one of the arguments in this book is that bilinguals’ experiences of self and identity are grounded in patterns of everyday discourse patterns of which speakers may be largely unaware, what can we learn by asking people directly how they feel in each language? Given the limits of participants’ awareness that constrain their ability to talk about how language functions (Silverstein 1981), if we attend to such self-reports, we must also ask more generally about the status of such explicit metalinguistic reflections. What are the constraints and potentials of participants’ metalinguistic awareness of the effects of their bilingualism? We will see that participants’ awareness/unawareness is relative. Although there is a long tradition in discourse and sociolinguistic studies of mistrusting participants’ own explanations of their language use, recent scholarship has renewed interest in the relevance of participants’ understandings of talk (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Silverstein 1985/1995; Woolard 1998a). In other words, bilinguals’ metapragmatic reports of how their bilingualism affects them also reveal their language ideologies (Crapanzano 1992; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Silverstein 1998; Woolard 1998a), that is, their interpretations of how linguistic form takes on social and psychological meaning. Although participants’ talk about talk cannot be taken as a transparent reflection of what they do in speech, participants’ accounts yield insight into the ways in which they understand the relationships among personhood, language, and context more generally.

62 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Finally, these self-reports are not the last word about participants’ identities in French and Portuguese—they will be integrated with speakers’ use of discourse forms, and with others’ responses to speakers’ speech. Therefore, while I do not rely on self-reports alone, analysis of self-reports is one of several ways of examining the local relationships between language and experience. In particular, building on the growing recognition that in a given population there is typically not a single, unified set of beliefs about language, but instead a “multiplicity and contention among language ideologies” (Gal 1998), in this chapter we will see how French-Portuguese bilinguals invoke multiple, competing ideologies of the relations among language, context, and self to explain how their bilingualism affects them (Crapanzano 1992; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Woolard 1998a). Participants wrestle among multiple understandings of the role of language in their experiences of self, context, and emotion, that shift between relatively more referential, pragmatic, and/or psychological accounts of language function. Following Silverstein (1981) and Crapanzano (1990, 1992), participants had difficulty discussing the pragmatic effects of their two languages without defaulting to more referential or psychological explanations. Previous Research on Bilinguals’ Accounts of Self in their Two Languages There is a small body of literature on bilinguals’ introspective reports of the impact of using two languages on their experiences of self and emotion. As discussed in chapter 2, there are a number of bilingual memoirists who have poignantly documented the process of becoming a “new person” in a new language. A handful of applied linguists have analyzed these memoirists’ accounts for the insights they reveal about bilingualism, self, and emotion more generally (Besemeres 2002, 2006; Kinginger 2004; Pavlenko 1998, 2001c, 2001d, 2006a, 2006b). With a nonliterary sample, Dewaele and Pavlenko (2003) conducted a large online survey of multilinguals’ self-reports of their experiences of language and self. In much of this scholarship, analysts depend largely upon participants’ (often highly developed) metalinguistic reflectiveness about the effects of their bilingualism, while attending somewhat less to the limits of that reflectiveness. In contrast, and of particular relevance to the current chapter, is the work of Pavlenko (2006b). The author analyzed the results of the Web questionnaire first presented in Dewaele and Pavlenko (2003), attending to how participants responded to the question of whether they feel like a different person in their different languages. Specifically, she examined the ideological frameworks to which participants appealed in order to explain their answers. Of the participants who denied any language-related change in self, few elaborated. Pavlenko suspected that some of these negative responders felt no need to explain

BILINGUALS’ REFLECTIONS 63

their answers, as they relied upon a common folk belief in a single, coherent self that language does not influence. The author speculated that perhaps the notion of a single, underlying self is so pervasive and entrenched, that these participants saw no need to explain. However 65% of her sample of multilingual participants (of over one thousand) said that indeed they did feel like a different person in their different languages. Pavlenko then explored the different explanations these positive responders offered to account for the between-language difference they felt, such as inherent linguistic and cultural differences, distinct learning contexts, different levels of emotionality in the different languages, and different levels of proficiency. Pavlenko noted that some of her participants appealed to a “non-agentive view of the speaker,” in which each language causes the speaker to be a certain way (2006b:13). Some participants also seemed to engage in a “hidden polemic” (2006b:25) with the notion that bilingualism leads to split personality, schizophrenia, or other types of psychopathology. These different frameworks became resources as speakers tried to explain why they felt like a different person in their different languages. In this chapter, I expand on this tradition, and in particular this recent work by Pavlenko (2006b), by examining in detail how bilingual participants talked about each language, and the understandings of language implicit in their accounts. Interview Context The one-on-one interviews I conducted with Luso-descendant participants1 discussed in this chapter followed the quasi-experiment described in the chapters 5 and 6. As participants generally positioned me as a French speaker, we more readily spoke French during this portion of the interviews reported in this chapter, with some code-switching to Portuguese. I asked participants to tell me how they felt speaking each language, specifically during the telling of stories in each language in the interview (see chapter 5), and how they feel using each language in general, beyond the current interview.2 I asked whether they experience their two languages as more similar to or different from each other, and if they do feel a difference, how they would describe and explain it. In other words, participants reported to me the functional effect that different ways of speaking produce for them, and how using each language contributes to their experience of self, affect, and context. Analytic Approach to Speakers’ Accounts My approach expands upon previous scholarship of bilinguals’ self-reports, as I examine how such reports are informed by local ideologies of language and personhood that shape how people are able to talk about their bilingualism. When bilinguals tell us they feel like a “different person” in each language, we

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will not just accept this as simply so, but probe what this means to them. For example, how do bilinguals come to an understanding of being “two people” from the messiness of their discursive practices in their two languages? In such an account, how do they implicitly see the relationship between personhood and speech more generally? We will therefore take bilinguals’ self-reports as rich manifestations of participants’ multiple beliefs about the relationships between self and language—beliefs they may struggle to reconcile with their actual discursive experiences. In what follows, we will review the multiple ways people explained what is “different” between each language. In general, we will see that participants describe the pragmatic effects of their bilingualism with great complexity. Their descriptions draw from multiple sources. For example, at some moments, speakers draw from other ambient beliefs in the primarily referential nature of language. In such a view, people use language to describe preexisting entities (selves, emotions, events), what Crapanzano calls an “empiricist view of the self, as existing independently of its linguistic designation” (1990:404). Language and experience then become separate orders of phenomena. In such a view, a participant may report that bilingualism might affect something intangible, but cannot affect her “identity,” as identities are fundamental, static “things” that each language only refers to after the fact. At other moments, speakers report that they take on French or Portuguese “national character” when speaking each language. In such accounts, they draw from romantic notions of the natural relationship between national languages and national character. In such a view, each language reflects the “mentality” or national spirit of France and Portugal. Speakers then report that they assume the corresponding mentality themselves, through their use of each language. And at other points in the same discussion, participants may appeal to more sociopragmatic, contextually grounded understandings of language, saying that indeed changing languages may effect an important change on some other level of social or psychological experience. Here, however, participants vary enormously in where and how they situate that change—changing languages changes the relationship, the “context,” or even what they refer to as their “personalities.” In other words, participants have some difficulty articulating the more indexical relations among language, self, and context. However, we will see that participants often offer multiple, even contradictory accounts of how and why they feel different in each language. For example, they may sometimes draw from ambient language ideologies that posit experience and language(s) as independent, and at other moments report how language thoroughly interpenetrates their experiences. For instance, at one moment a speaker might say that she expresses the “same feelings” in each

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language. At another moment, the same person may talk about how shifting languages produces for her a different “sensation.” While reporting this different sensation, the speaker may acknowledge the “bizarreness” of such an observation, nodding to a folk belief that language and feelings are distinct levels of phenomena. Within such a language ideology in which language and experience are independent, the speaker’s report of how deeply language penetrates and shapes her experience might be hard for her to reconcile. Nonetheless at other moments, the same speaker can comment at great length about the effects of language choice on experience of self and context. Ultimately, speakers may not fully reconcile these contradictory accounts, but may maintain such a multiplicity of beliefs simultaneously. In this respect, these bilingual participants display the same type of plurality of concurrently held language ideologies, from multiple sources that scholars have begun to recognize as the norm in many groups (Gal 1993, 1998). Linda’s Multiple Accounts of the Relationships between Languages and Experience As a lead-in to the discussion below of how people discuss the relationship between language and self, let us consider the reflections of one participant, Linda, and her extensive comments about how she experiences herself in each language.3 It’s not the same personality in French and in Portuguese, well, for me at any rate. I’m a rather strange person, so for me . . . I don’t know how to explain it . . . I have one of my cousins, “Yeah, I like to hear you speak Portuguese, because, you’d think it wasn’t the same person speaking.” But I’m like, “Yeah, because the accent isn’t the same.” She’s like, “No, no, there’s something that changes.” . . . When I speak French and I switch to Portuguese, there’s something that’s different, but what, I dunno, I feel it, y’know. I know that on the inside there is, let’s say that I’m maybe happier when I speak Portuguese than when I speak French . . . I tell myself it’s maybe that, but I can’t tell you, y’know. People often tell me there is a difference when I speak French, when I speak Portuguese . . . it’s especially my cousins when, as they often hear me speak French, when they, sometimes I tell them something in Portuguese, I start, y’know, they look at me, “Woo, it’s not the same Linda.” And I’m like, “Oh really?” I’m like, “There’s no difference.” They’re like, “There’s something when you speak. It’s not the same thing, y’know.”. . . People who know me in Portuguese, well, Portuguese especially, I think they see me as a shyer person . . . more calm and reserved, whereas in French . . . I’m a little wacky, y’know . . . ((Talking about her boyfriend)) . . . He’s like, “It’s true that I don’t know you as a French girl. I know you as a Portuguese girl.” And it’s true that you hear me, for example, my mother she asks me for something, I’m like, “Oh mom, y’know, it’s over there, in the cupboard on the right.” He looks at me, he says to me like, “Yeah, it’s different when she speaks, it’s not the same person when I speak . . . both languages.” For him, it’s “Linda, the

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Portuguese girl,” you know . . . That’s it. There’s no Linda, there’s no France. (Koven 2004b: 477)

From this excerpt, we see the multiple ways that Linda accounts for how she is different in her two languages. She invokes psychological constructs, such as “personality,” which she acknowledges might sound odd, as having multiple personalities evokes connotations of psychopathology.4 She then proceeds to report that others (her cousins, her boyfriend) experience her as different. Throughout she repeats that there is something that changes, but has difficulty articulating what that something is. It’s not only “accent.” It’s how others see her (calm or wacky), how she feels (happier) on the inside (where she situates feeling), all brought on by language. Linda is both very eloquent and inarticulate about this phenomenon—she has difficulty putting her finger on what actually changes, and how language effects this change. Linda’s account previews the discussion below. In what follows, I try to give a sense of the recurrent, often plural ways participants accounted for their experience of difference in French and Portuguese. We will see how others, like Linda, explain this phenomenon, as well as how the same person explains it in multiple, sometimes even contradictory ways. We recurrently find a tension between their eloquence and inarticulateness. Linda and the other speakers grope for ways to talk about what are essentially pragmatic effects of language use. They are able to talk elaborately about this topic, but are often at a loss for a single, coherent account. This is not surprising, as it has been argued (Silverstein 1981) that pragmatic aspects of meaning are often the most elusive to native awareness. Overview of Multiple Accounts of Language and Experience Below, I describe the different ways speakers reported the effects of using French and Portuguese. We will begin with speakers’ reactions to the experience of having had to narrate the same personal experience in each language (see chapters 5 and 6). We will then discuss the different ways people described their experience of what is “different” and the “same” in their use of each language in general, moving from more referential to more indexical views of language function. At times, people described that the difference in speaking French and Portuguese comes from an effect intrinsic to the languages themselves, as if the languages were autonomous decontextualized agents. French or Portuguese as a language is then characterized in particular ways that compel or cause speakers to adopt the characteristics of the language when speaking. Most participants talked more specifically about their different self-expression in each language, as a function of the lexical resources of each language, in particular, in terms of what they described as the nonequivalent “vocabulary” in French and Portuguese. Some phrased this in terms of the objective

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resources (the “vocabulary”) in each language that constrain or enable their self-expression. For example, some argued that there are certain words for cursing, being affectionate, and so forth, that simply do not exist in both languages. From this perspective they can only say what the language itself permits. Others described the power of each language to constrain or enable their self-expression in terms of their own incomplete mastery of equivalent vocabulary in each language. From this perspective, it is not the language but the speaker that is incomplete. Finally some discussed this difference in vocabulary in terms of their reluctance to use equivalent vocabulary in each. In addition to the different reasons given for their different “vocabularies” in French and Portuguese, people varied in the impact they attributed to the difference. Whereas some saw the effect of this difference as relatively restricted and limited, merely making their self-expression less elaborate, rather than fundamentally different, other participants connected this different “vocabulary” to the production or experience of their language-specific identities. Some then talked about how these different vocabularies conjure up different “mentalities” in Portuguese and French that by necessity are evoked when speaking each language. Some participants were able to discuss more pragmatic views of language, as each language becomes part of the “contexts.” Some women talked about how each language evokes and creates different interpersonal dynamics. Finally some people talked about the effects of using each language in less interactional and more explicitly psychological, intrapersonal terms—as creating different feelings, providing the speaker with a different way of “seeing” and even with making the speaker feel that she has two personalities. Although discourse scholars may understand the relationship between these various levels of analysis in particular ways, in this chapter we will be paying attention to how these bilingual participants themselves invoke, relate, or fail to relate these different levels, in their own understandings of the relationships among language, context, and self. “The Same but Different”: Referential versus Indexical Accounts of the Differences between Speaking French versus Portuguese Participants struggled to explain how speaking French versus Portuguese can both be the “same but different,” by shuttling between more referential and more indexical understandings of language function. This tension emerged most clearly in response to one of the first questions I asked people in the follow-up interview, which was “What was it like to tell the same stories in both languages?” Eighteen of the twenty-three participants (78.3%) said explicitly in the interview that there was something quite different in their experience of speaking in each language in the interview setting. However, speakers varied in whether speakers emphasized what was similar as opposed to what was

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different between their French and Portuguese tellings. This difference in emphasis seems to relate to whether they highlighted the content as opposed to pragmatic dimensions of the French and Portuguese narrations. As Teresa said, “I nevertheless was able to—, even though it’s not the same words . . . the idea was translated in . . . both languages, y’know.” (emphasis mine). Here we see that this woman holds on to the idea that there is some stable, referential core, “the idea,” that exists in both tellings, despite different words. For this speaker, it seems that she focuses more on the sameness between the two versions. Clara described the whole task in the following way, “How are we going to express the same feelings and then how are we going to tell the same action, y’know.” For her, she saw the narrative tasks as a challenge to try to describe the “same” emotions and actions. Often people had a difficult time articulating what varied and what was stable across two tellings in two languages, acknowledging both stability and difference. In the words of Linda, “In Portuguese, it’s different. The same story . . . seems to me, I dunno, it seems a little different, and nonetheless it’s the same, y’know, but I mean . . . in Portuguese . . . it’s more subtle, well, it’s odd, y’know . . . In fact, for me, it wasn’t the same thing, you know . . . When I was telling stories . . . I didn’t feel like I was repeating myself.” Here Linda presented the tension, but had some difficulty articulating the nature of the difference. In the end, after reporting that the Portuguese tellings were “more subtle,” she seemed to recognize that explaining how her two tellings could be both the same, yet different, is “odd.” Indeed most of the participants remarked that the result in both languages may not have been or felt identical, even if the “idea” was the same. Some participants, such as Margarida, just reported that French versus Portuguese stories weren’t told in the “same way,” but couldn’t say much more. Marina stated, “it’s funny, because it’s never the same in each language.” When people said the two versions differed, it was therefore difficult for them to discern or specify the nature of the difference. It is as if the participants implicitly recognized that their stories have different kinds of meaning—the more referential (the “idea”), and the more indexical. From people’s comments about the experience of narrating personal stories in each language, we begin to see some of the ways these women understand the experience of speaking in two languages. These women implicitly discuss how using each language indexed meanings in their stories beyond basic referential content. It was difficult for them to explain what those meanings were, and what produces them. However, most acknowledged that something important shifted between French and Portuguese tellings.

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Intrinsic Differences between French and Portuguese: “French is cold and rude; Portuguese is warm and singsong” I asked participants to compare French and Portuguese, with the following question: “For you, are Portuguese and French more similar to or more different from each other?” I posed the question in general terms, to allow people to reflect about and compare their languages as they desired. Twenty of twentythree people (87%) responded that they felt the two languages are more different from than similar to each other. I then asked people to describe the differences and similarities between the two languages. Everyone presupposed the fundamental separateness and distinctness of these two languages. Although some said that they realize that both are derived from Latin, they nonetheless experience them as “completely different,” or “two opposite languages.” Many situated the difference between the two languages in the sound system of each language, or their sonorité or prononciation. These differences were not described neutrally. Participants typically showed a strong aesthetic preference for hearing and speaking Portuguese. Judgments were quickly ascribed to these differences. In general, more positive images were attributed to Portuguese than to French, in the explicit comparisons of the language, where it was asserted that Portuguese is inherently more beautiful. Typically participants reported that French is monotonous and banal, whereas Portuguese is warm and lively.5 Vanessa expressed her quasi-indifference to French in the following way: “French, it’s more a language, pff, I dunno, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it, eh, because I speak it, so, obligatorily, I don’t have a choice,” whereas Portuguese captivates her more. Linda said that French is “flat . . . like a big straight line,” whereas Portuguese is more singsong or musical. Ana said that Portuguese exudes warmth, it’s more alive, more suave, like a wave. Sofia described French as cold, severe, and harsh, as opposed to the musical nature of Portuguese. Several characterized French as an inherently more aggressive language. In the words of Teresa, “It [Portuguese] isn’t an aggressive language. Yeah, French can be aggressive.” On the one hand, participants often provided these general descriptions of the inherent properties of French and Portuguese, as if each language were a decontextualizable object, removed and removable from any specific speaker or event of speaking. On the other hand, these reported differences sound not only like aesthetic characterizations of sound, but like characterizations of speakers. It is as if, for these speakers, a language embodies a temperament. As Irvine and Gal (2000) have noted, people often depend on fractal recursivity in their language ideologies, taking a distinction from one level of analysis (the perception of difference between two languages) and imposing it on another level of analysis (the perception of the “same” difference between two groups or kinds of people). Identifying this process is useful for seeing how participants link their characterizations of the different languages to

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characterizations of French and Portuguese speakers and their “mentalities.” Indeed, when people appealed to the idea of a Portuguese and a French national character—a people or a nation—that has a different “mentality,” they would describe it in terms similar to those used for the language. People describe the languages, mentalities, and users in parallel terms. Not only is the Portuguese language warmer and more convivial, and French colder, Portuguese and French people respectively are as well. Participants could thus be “more Portuguese,” that is, more like the “Portuguese mentality,” when speaking Portuguese. As will be discussed further below, it may also help us understand how participants also make the link between speaking two languages that are “totally different” to feeling that they are a totally different person in each language. (Somewhat) Pragmatic Accounts In this section, we will see how some participants struggled to provide more pragmatic, indexical accounts of the impact of their two languages. Different “Vocabularies” In addition to differences in how the two languages “sound,” participants also commented that another major difference between French and Portuguese is the incommensurate “vocabulary” or “vocabulary levels” in each language. Rather than assume that participants’ vernacular use of the term vocabulary” has the same meaning to them as it may to analysts, let us see how participants invoked it. Some framed the difference as one of their lack of the “same” vocabulary in Portuguese, attributing this different vocabulary to their own incomplete knowledge of comparable “vocabulary” in each language (what others can say in each language, but that they cannot, because of ignorance). These speakers posit that the two languages must be equivalent sociolinguistic systems with comparable register systems, that they would be able to use if they were fully bilingual. Some reported that they may know fewer ways of describing an event in Portuguese, and thus their Portuguese accounts were less referentially precise than their French accounts. In the words of Isabel, I express myself well in Portuguese. I command it well, I’m very capable of telling it [a story] in Portuguese . . . but in French, you have another vocabulary . . . you have a more familiar vocabulary . . . [in Portuguese] you’ve got missing vocabulary at any rate. There are expressions that you don’t know because either they’re created every summer, so you get there, you’re a little . . . everything that’s slang.

For Isabel, “vocabulary” is something that one can lack or have, know or not know. It evolves over time. In particular, she is concerned with colloquial “vocabulary.”

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Many talked about this difference in vocabulary as an intrinsic property of the languages themselves. From this perspective, it is not merely a question of having less vocabulary, but of having different vocabulary or a different style in each language. For example, Aldina framed this as the objectively available vocabulary resources in both languages for talking about specific topics. She said that she found it easier to tell a story about her racist relatives in French than in Portuguese, because there are more and different nuances in French for talking about race, not as a function of her own knowledge, but of what the French language itself permits. For those who described French and Portuguese registers as inherently nonequivalent, most discussed the noncomparability of both more colloquial and more formal styles. Most people discussed the vocabulary differences in terms of the translatability of “young,” familiar, or slang expressions from one language to the other. Some said that Portuguese is overall a more formal language, referring to a greater use of honorific forms in Portuguese. Marina had a different perspective, however, claiming that there are fewer extremes of both high and low in Portuguese than in French. In her words, it’s easier to speak in a middle style that is neither too vulgar nor too bourgeois in Portuguese. Others commented that familiar Portuguese and familiar French simply have very different connotations. Beatriz reported that it is because familiar expressions are totally different in each language that switching languages feels odd at times. People disagreed about the relative frequency and force of obscenities in each language, some claiming that they are less forceful and more frequent in French, and others that they are less forceful and more frequent in Portuguese. In addition to attributing French versus Portuguese vocabulary differences to their own deficits, or to the inherent nontranslatability of registers across languages, some women adopted a third explanation. They may know “equivalent” vocabulary in the other language but are unwilling or reluctant to use it, (what others can say, but they will not or prefer not to). With this explanation, for example a speaker may know how to curse in both languages but choose not to in Portuguese because of the different “meanings” of profanity in Portuguese contexts. From these comments, we see that most women noted the noncomparability of registers in French and Portuguese but had varying interpretations about the nature and source of these differences. Of what consequence would the difference in vocabularies be? Some participants linked their nonequivalent “vocabulary” to the identities they perform in each language. Different “vocabulary” may constrain or enable how these women express who they are. Ana explicitly linked her use of these intrinsically noncomparable vocabularies to her different experience of identity in each language.

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I speak like they speak over there, you know . . . I use the same expressions . . . when I’m there, I like to say the same dirty words that they say over there . . . I have a language in Portuguese, in French which isn’t the same . . . and it comes to me automatically . . . in Portuguese I adopt the talk of my region, and which is . . . to speak a little vulgarly . . . automatically I, as if my personality, well, in Portuguese, it takes on automatically, the context, the cultural, everything that’s over there.

When she speaks Portuguese, she uses the typical style of colloquialisms of her region. By using this local style, she assumes another identity. The different colloquial styles lead her to adopt a different persona. Despite these different interpretations of the source of the problem, “vocabulary” thus seems to be a way these women talk about access to and command of verbal resources in each language. With their discussion of “familiar” and “formal” speech in each language, it seems to be their specific way of talking about sociolinguistic variation in each language. Without a larger inquiry into sociolinguistic norms in Portuguese and French, it is difficult to determine the “objective” source of this difference “vocabulary” reported by speakers. Does it come from these women’s limited knowledge of comparable Portuguese registers, their sense of entitlement to use different ranges and kinds of language, or some broader difference between speech levels in Portuguese and French in general that a comparative sociolinguistic portrait might reveal?6 In some sense, the reasons for this divergence do not change the fact that the divergence is consequential for what speakers can “do” and who they can “be” in each language. Bilingual or not, any speaker is positioned as a user of a particular subset of varieties of a “language.” No speaker has access to the entire verbal repertoire of their speech community. This differential access is intrinsically linked to questions of identity. That speakers might have access to multiple ways of saying the same thing in some contexts, and in other contexts may find themselves restricted to fewer options, is part of the very process that links sociolinguistic and social differentiation. The forms any speaker uses, recognizes, and does not use are semiotic resources and constraints in speakers’ claims to identity, whatever the multiple reasons for their use and nonuse. Evokes Other Contexts Several women talked about the difference between the two languages in terms of their evocative power. Several people commented on the indexical properties of each language to summon up other contexts. For example, some women noted how their use of Portuguese makes them feel transported to a different time and place. Clara said that in Portuguese, she felt transported back to Portugal. “I think that when I start speaking Portuguese, well, immediately it evokes for me my vacation, you know . . . what I experience

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there, the people that I see. It makes me think of that right away, you know, it’s like “bang” for me.” Catarina put it very eloquently. It’s always strange to . . . change languages (.) Even if you’re in . . . in the same setting . . . in the same place, you feel like everything changes around you . . . The fact of speaking another language, you feel like right away you are in another, like you’re in another culture, you feel like the place changes, with, y’know. It’s funny . . . and from the moment when I speak French or Portuguese, I feel like everything around me changes, so, so that’s why I find that it’s completely different . . . I feel like when speaking Portuguese, right away I’m in another world right away in another culture . . . It’s another color . . . Right away it’s different . . . I am transposed in another world . . . I am transposed into another I don’t know if it’s a state of mind . . . Yeah, I think so . . . I can’t define it any further.

Alexandra reported that merely hearing Portuguese can conjure up for her the feeling of being in Portugal. When she listens to her Portuguese professors talk, she closes her eyes and travels to Portugal. Isabel reported how speaking Portuguese takes her back to her memories of having lived in Portugal as a child. “You feel like, I’m back in childhood . . . It reminds me of all my memories . . . I’m very attached to the language, because it reminds me of all my memories. All my good childhood memories.” In their comments, these women allude to the indexical linkages among language, context, and experience. In particular, these reflections show the creative role that language can play in evoking context. The experience of language is often part of one’s experience of context. A shift in language can thus invoke shifts in one’s experience of place and time. Different Interpersonal Relations Some women talked about the influence of language on interaction, by describing how speaking Portuguese changes their relationships with people. Several women stated that speaking Portuguese brings them closer to their interlocutors. Margarida, for example reported that switching to Portuguese feels more sincere and stronger than speaking French. Ana reported the following example. I was a Portuguese interpreter . . . for a lecture . . . here in France . . . and then I wasn’t the same, it’s funny, because, in Portuguese, automatically, for me, it sets up a different connection for me . . . I feel much closer to people when I speak . . . I allow myself more things . . . I joke more . . . I connect with people more easily.

As mentioned earlier, several reported that they react differently with people, by being less verbally aggressive in Portuguese. They are calmer and “chew people out less.”

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“The Countries (as Contexts) are Different, Therefore I Am Different” Participants discussed the relation of language to context in more monolithic ways. Some participants explicitly reported that they felt different in each language because the “contexts” were different, and “made” them speak differently. Unlike recent scholarly discussions that treat the relation of context to interaction as dynamic and emergent, rather than fixed (Goodwin and Duranti 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990), Luso-descendant participants often talked about context in more static terms. In particular, speakers seemed to understand context as country (France or Portugal), and/or the people in that country. Given their linking of each language to two monolingual nationstates, this is not surprising. Some went so far as to say they felt like a different person, both in each language and in each country. Susana said, “It’s two different people . . . I’m totally different.” In Portugal, she tries to change her “personality.” One part of me is French and one part of me is Portuguese. All that is tied together, even in my way of acting, in my way of dressing and all. This means that in Portugal . . . I’ll try to change my personality . . . how to express yourself . . . in my way of dressing, for example there are things that I’ll wear in France that I won’t wear in Portugal . . . There are a lot of girls [whom I know] who have already said that. In Portugal I have fewer complexes . . . about wearing a skirt or shorts, whereas in France, I dress the French way . . . Yeah . . . It’s two different people. I don’t know how to define that. But, let’s say that I’m totally different, eh. Everybody tells me, even my personality, in my way of talking, of being with people. I’m not the same in France and in Portugal . . . I think I’m more closed in France . . . introverted . . . and in Portugal, I’m more, I’m the type to let out…all my feelings . . . to express myself, to be more wacky . . . I have an easier time talking with people about my problems and worries and feelings . . . than in France. While in France . . . I’m shier . . . whereas in Portugal I’m more explosive, let’s say, I’d be more shameless . . . It’s connected to the people . . . I feel more comfortable with them.

Others also explicitly say that they take on a new identity in the context of Portugal. “When I was there, I had another, I adopted, in fact, more or less a different identity,” noted Ana. This woman went so far as to pretend that she didn’t live in France and was a “real” Portuguese. “I didn’t have an easy time being the daughter of émigrés. I was ashamed . . . so I lied. When I was young, I remember, I lied to people over there. I told them that I lived in Portugal.” Some participants reported less extreme transformations. Several said that they feel happier and more fun-loving in Portugal, and more serious and studious in France. Given that most of them spend the school year in France, and summer vacation in Portugal, this makes sense. Others remarked that they change in response to the different “mentality.” Maria remarked that she is more “open” because people in Portugal are more open. As Margarida said

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succinctly, “I live differently there.” Elena said, “I don’t chew people out as much in Portuguese—maybe ‘cause I don’t know the vocabulary.” Isabel recognized the pressure to act like a different person in Portugal, but resisted the idea that she should be expected to behave differently in Portuguese contexts. She seemed to believe that her identity should remain stable across contexts. Below is her description of how the different Portuguese “mentality” exerts pressure on her to change her “real” identity. The mentality is a little, (.) I‘d say, not backward, but let’s say behind relative to us. It’s not really the same . . . I used to stay in the café with friends till two a.m., well, okay . . . with boys . . . I’d stay till two a.m. like I do here. And my godmother would say to me,” No way. Do you realize, a young girl, by herself, till two a.m., with boys? No way.” So you have to adopt a way of living that isn’t at all your own, and to get used to it . . . to to (.) hold back, to, to reduce your freedom . . . My parents are much stricter there than here . . . That’s what’s funny . . . That’s not how I want to live.

Isabel juxtaposes her desires and identity in France with the social pressures to behave differently in Portugal. The identity she would be expected to assume in Portugal confines her in her sense of who she “really” is. Like many others, she talks about a Portuguese mentality that constrains how she can act. Interestingly, she describes how her parents behave differently in Portugal, imposing local norms of propriety on their daughter (part of mentality). This change in their behavior becomes a (resisted) pressure for the daughter to change hers. Finally, Vanessa described her contextual shifts in behavior and experience as similar to the shifts all people make in different contexts. I’m certainly not going to react in the same way as I react in Portugal. Well, I act differently. Even here in France I act differently. I’m not gonna react the same way with you, for example, with my parents . . . even with my friends, even people I meet at a lecture or whatever . . . that’s sure. I’m not gonna show up, “Hey dude,” when it’s the president of I dunno what . . . It’s normal. And in Portugal, it’s the same thing.

Here we see that these women are indeed sensitive to the role that language and context play in how people act and feel, where both terms are understood in these relatively stable ways. Psychological Accounts In this section, we will see the different ways people interpreted the effect of language in a more psychological idiom. Here people seemed able to acknowledge that language itself can precipitate a change in context, but situate such changes in more intra-individual, internal, mental sites.

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At some point in the interview, most people ended up locating the differences associated with speaking each language in psychological terms—as a different sensation, a different way of perceiving, or a different way of being. Eighteen of twenty-three (78%) reported that they feel different in their two languages. Some, but not all went so far as to say that this difference in how they felt was connected to a change in personalities. Below, I present the different ways that these women talked about this different feeling. A Different Sensation A number of speakers reported that speaking Portuguese yields a different sensation. Perhaps related to their discussions of the intrinsic differences in the languages, or to how people interact differently with each other when speaking each language, participants frequently stated that speaking Portuguese lends a more personal and intimate feeling than speaking French. It gives not only a different tinge to an interaction, but a different experience for the bilingual speaker herself. Emília said that she is more passionate when she speaks Portuguese. Some reported that it changes how they feel about themselves. Maria said, “I feel better about myself . . . I don’t really know how to explain that sensation, but I I feel good, y’know.” Below, Isabel discusses how a language can tap into an experience of self that has dimensions of both depth and interiority that the language then brings out. It’s that Portuguese touches me a lot more than French . . . It’s different. It’s not the same sensation as in French. French is more impersonal. Portuguese is really deep inside you . . . Well you express it in another way in French . . . You tell it with more detachment . . . You can be more touched when you tell it in Portuguese . . . French you get to a point where it’s impersonal.

Catarina reported similar feelings, By speaking Portuguese, I feel like right away it’s more intimate . . . because in fact, for me, Portuguese represents intimacy, because it was at home . . . It’s true that in speaking Portuguese I feel like unconsciously I’m revealing some part of myself . . . Well, yeah, it’s more something closer . . . Whereas French is more a language to express oneself, Portuguese a language to express oneself, but there’s something more . . . I feel like . . . the words are closer to people . . . I dunno, there’s really something very different . . . The words are more expressive, maybe human, I dunno.

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A Different Voice Some of the women remarked that they feel like a different person in each language because their voice changes, as if part of identity becomes tied up with an auditory image of self. Note the following remarks from two different speakers, who tie differences in their voices to different experiences of who they are. Andreia said, “We [Luso-descendants] don’t have the same voice . . . I’ve already been told that I have a higher voice and that I seemed younger when speaking Portuguese.” Susana said, “Sometimes when I hear myself speaking Portuguese, I feel like I don’t recognize my voice sometimes . . . I feel like I have another voice when I speak Portuguese and to have two different voices . . . It feels strange . . . I feel like I’m another person.” As noted by Sapir (1927/1985), Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum (1960), Giles and Powesland (1975), and Urciuoli (1998), a voice can conjure up much more than differences in formal sound patterns. These women seem to be referring not just to the effect of using different pronunciation, but to the effect of inhabiting a different persona associated with the sound images of another language, though they may not identify equally with the different personas at hand. Makes You Talk Differently, So You are Different Building on earlier discussion above of speakers’ nonequivalent ways of speaking in each language, some of the women see their differences in vocabulary as directly consequential for who they are or can be in each language. Similar to what Pavlenko (2006b) found, from this perspective, it is the language that is the agent, and the speaker is passively shaped by it. Beatriz reported that her vocabulary differences effect a personality change. Her different way of talking, because she uses different words, and a different vocabulary, “defines you a little . . . It’s true that it reveals different personalities.” She alleges that she is consequently more withdrawn in Portuguese and wackier in French. Clara noted that, her lesser facility aside, she has a different way of speaking and expressing herself in Portuguese that has as much or more to do with her identity than with her mastery of the language. “We don’t have the same way of expressing . . . How to say it . . . We don’t say the same things . . . We maybe don’t react in the same way.” Ana reported the following: Automatically I, as if my personality, well, in Portuguese, it integrated automatically the context, the cultural, everything that there is there . . . I feel Portuguese basically . . . more Portuguese . . . I speak like the people from over there, I say the little dirty words, I goof around like people from there, I tease like people from over there . . . I joke around differently too, y’know, tons of little things like that.

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Antónia talked about how she is different in Portuguese because she doesn’t command “expressions and interjections,” therefore coming off as less spontaneous than she feels in French. I have spontaneity in French. I have expressions . . . things that I can express right away in French. Whereas if I’m with a Portuguese person . . . I’d have a tendency to express it in Portuguese and I can’t because I don’t know the recent expressions, the . . . interjections.

Here we see that these women attribute a causal role to language itself in their experiences of identity in each language. The language makes them— prevents from being or allows them to be—a particular way. Others Perceive You Differently, So You Feel Different Some women commented that others’ reactions to their bilingual speech play a role in their sense of having a different identity or personality in both languages. As Sofia said explicitly, “Because people get a different sense of you and see you as different, it makes you feel different.” Recall also the quote from Linda at the beginning of this chapter, showing how her different personalities in each language are in part a result of how her cousins and her boyfriend respond to her in each language. These women acknowledge that the experience of identity is reflexive, that is, it comes from a feedback loop of how others see/hear them. Makes You Perceive Differently Others focused not only on how they feel different, but on how they perceive the world differently when they speak Portuguese, stepping not so much into a different persona, as a different perspective, often invoking visual metaphors. Antonia said that she can see things from a more French or Portuguese perspective when she speaks each language. Beatriz said that each version provided a different way of seeing the same event. She reported that when she speaks Portuguese, she understands more about Portuguese people. When we speak Portuguese, we have the images in our head. And if I speak in French, I don’t see the same people . . . I’m talking about the neighbors, I can’t see the street, but if I speak in Portuguese, I see the person right away.

It is as if speaking the language conjures up other interpretive frameworks for these women. Two Personalities Some people reported that the shift that they feel is sufficiently deep to involve having a separate personality in each language. As discussed elsewhere, these participants most probably do not use the term personality as

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a psychologist might. Nonetheless, by personality, they seem to mean a profound shift in how they experience themselves. Susana expressed this explicitly: “I feel like I’m two girls at the same time . . . of being a Portuguese girl and a French girl, well, depending on the context . . . Let’s say that I have a double personality.” It is similar for Andreia, as she notes. We [my classmates and I] were often talking about that. There was a dissertation at the beginning of the century that said that it was a handicap and that they were schizophrenic. And so, overall . . . we have two different personalities. And that’s why sometimes you don’t find the same person . . . that it’s another person speaking.7

In this way, they situate within themselves psychologically the experience of inhabiting another persona. Several women talked about how each language “fits” who they are more or less well. One language “suits” them better than the other. As Margarida said, “Speaking Portuguese –it’s more me.” Andreia described her different “ways” in responses to my (Michèle’s) questions. A: It’s sure that my way of speaking in French is nothing like my way of speaking Portuguese . . . My way of speaking French fits me a lot more. It’s almost my mirror, whereas my way of speaking Portuguese, given that I have less ease . . . It’s less spontaneous, it’s, I dunno, it doesn’t fit me as much. Michèle: If someone only knows you in Portuguese? A: They’ll have another image of me. They’ll take me for someone shyer, more reserved, who talks less, lots of things like that . . . Michèle: And what if someone only knows you in French? What do they know? What do they not know? . . . A: Well for one, I speak more . . . I’m more comfortable, more sure of myself, that I’m more mature maybe too . . . less intelligent somehow, too . . . to have fewer things to say, of being less interesting, y’know . . . to still be considered like somehow still like a child, y’know… Michèle: And in French? A: No, like the age that I am.

Without reducing the power of speaking another language to affect how they feel, some people were reluctant to claim that they change quite so radically. For Isabel, quoted below, “personality” may conjure up something that is supposed to be stable, unlike “attachments” and “feelings” that she accepts as more dynamic and influenceable by language. I don’t change my personality because I’m speaking Portuguese. The only thing that could change when I speak Portuguese is . . . this attachment that I have for the language and the country. It’s . . . more personal . . . It’s anchored deep inside me . . . And it’s true that when I speak Portuguese, I have this attachment, it’s more, it’s more personal, it’s more intimate . . . It’s something that’s really deep inside you.

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Furthermore, two women reported that their sense of having a different personality in each language has changed over time. Elena reported that she feels like there’s an ever-growing rift in how she feels in Portuguese and French, now that she is older. On the other hand, Cristina reported that this rift has diminished for her with time. She lived in Portugal during her adolescence, and returned to France at age twenty-one. She initially felt that she expressed her personality, or her sense of who she was, differently in both languages. Now at the age of twenty-four, she’s no longer so sure. Two years ago, she felt she was much more expansive and joyous in Portuguese, and more withdrawn in French. This difference is less pronounced now. In other words, this experience of being a different person is not necessarily static for the same person over time, as their experiences in different contexts evolve. Different Expressions of Anger Many speakers reported that they expressed their feelings differently in each language. More specifically, as one example of this, we will discuss how participants felt they express anger differently in their two languages.8 Nearly all the participants, for instance, reported that they felt they could be angry more effectively in French. Most seem to adopt a hydraulic theory of anger (Solomon 1984), as a combustible, accumulative internal energy, that can be released, or dammed up. Language then becomes an important medium through which that energy can be set free or contained. Typically, speakers reported that they can explode in French, but must contain themselves in Portuguese. As Beatriz put it, with her parents, if she’s speaking Portuguese, she will swallow her anger until she explodes. To allow for this release, the words can either “come,” or not, to the speaker, for the anger to “go out.” In this regard, the speaker passively waits for speech that can release anger. Without the right linguistic resources, the anger cannot leave. As one reported: “Let’s say that I have a hard time expressing . . . my anger in . . . Portuguese. I can’t. It’s impossible. It doesn’t come out . . . what will come out will be really minimal in relation to what I have inside. I wouldn’t be able to express it.” Another reported: “Something is missing to express feelings in Portuguese. I get really angry in French. In Portuguese it doesn’t come. In French it comes.” And Linda said, “I get angry more easily in French . . . It comes out more easily in French and I have a harder time in Portuguese . . . For example, with my boyfriend when we have it out (s’engueuler), it gets in the way and I want to tell him tons of things, but it doesn’t come out like that right away, whereas it comes to me right away in French.” In this view, emotion is a natural force that when paired with language that comes to the speaker, can come out into social space. French linguistic resources facilitate this better than Portuguese for these speakers.

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Furthermore, multiple speakers talked about the importance of speed in the verbal release of anger. They express anger more effectively in French, because they can speak more rapidly. It takes off more quickly in French. (..) I’m able to run off all my anger in French. But for example, if it’s with my parents, I’m totally able to be angry in Portuguese . . . It’s different but I think that I do better in French . . . I’m able to be to express much more when I’m angry what I feel in French, yeah . . . because it’s much quicker. The speed comes out in French.

The claims that angry speakers make are also something that can be done with greater or lesser precision. As one woman stated, she can explain her rage in French and not in Portuguese. Several reported that they feel so compelled to use French when they are angry, they sometimes inadvertently speak French, even in the presence of a monolingual Portuguese interlocutor. Several reported that anger is the only reason they speak French in Portugal. Emília reported an argument with her monolingual Portuguese aunt in Portugal. She was so angry that, even though her aunt speaks only Portuguese, she started speaking French without even realizing it. In this regard, the language a speaker uses when angry is presented as beyond the speaker’s control. In their discussion of anger expression, some participants were able to adopt a more pragmatic rather than psychological account: Anger is something they do interactionally, by yelling at or insulting people. Several reported that they only bawl people out (engueuler) in French. So, for example, whereas Teresa denied feeling like a different person in Portuguese, she did note that she would be more likely to insult someone in French. “If it’s someone in France that I don’t know, I’d be more likely to insult them in French . . . When I was verbally attacked by the guy on the phone, I called him a dirty asshole (sale con) . . . right away. It came to me in French, y’know.” Antónia reported that she yells at her parents and argues with them in French. Luisa says that she uses Portuguese to deliberately calm herself, because she is less likely to yell in it. Several women talked about the challenge of fighting with their monolingual Portuguese boyfriends in Portuguese. As one put it, her boyfriend consistently gets the upper hand in arguments. For this reason, she only swears in French and fights with her parents in French. Therefore the speech acts associated with angry displays (arguing, insulting, yelling) become the focus of what speakers feel more willing or able to do in French. Others talked explicitly about the semiotic resources needed to express anger. Here again, speakers discussed the role of their nonequivalent vocabularies: the familiar and vulgar language that speakers argued either they don’t know how to use, or doesn’t exist, or that they are unwilling to use in Portuguese. Twenty of the twenty-three participants reported that they swear more readily in French than in Portuguese. Sofia reported that when she is very an-

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gry, she wants to swear. If she is in a Portuguese context, she will nonetheless swear in French. When it’s too vulgar for Portuguese, she speaks in French in her furor. It’s not clear whether the issue is that she doesn’t know how to swear in Portuguese, or that she feels uncomfortable doing so. Several explicitly framed it as a matter of disliking Portuguese swearing, making swearing in French a choice. Others reported the relationship between swearing and language choice as being one where swearing allows a better release of anger. Without the outlet of swearing, one has to contain oneself and calm down. As several reported, this means that their anger in Portuguese never escalates and that they therefore come across as more reserved and diplomatic in Portuguese. Because I was mad [at my monolingual Portuguese boyfriend] and in Portuguese it wasn’t coming, you know. It came, okay . . . I said several little things but it didn’t come with as much force as in French, whereas in French I was everything that was ready to be unleashed. And in Portuguese I had to control, calm yourself . . . otherwise it would have been “you’re a pain in my ass, fuck you, don’t stress me out.” All that, whereas in Portuguese I didn’t have that vocabulary . . . So I’m always having to control it a little bit . . . Whereas in Portuguese, doesn’t understand because . . . I don’t have all the vocabulary, so that makes it beat around the bush, y’see, you have little things that are similar, but that’s not it . . . It’s in French, it’s direct, y’know. It’s “You stress the shit out of me. You’re a pain in the ass.”9 It’s simple. (Isabel in Koven 2004b:477)

Luisa reported a similar linkage between slang vocabulary and how she displays anger, and also how she comes across in each language. It’s true that in Portuguese, well in general . . . I know that I contain myself, I’m able to calm down, telling myself that, because I can’t stand hearing someone speaking vulgarly/coarsely in Portuguese. I find it horrible. So I know how to contain myself and I tell myself, “Well, I’m going to take it calmly et cetera,” but it stays inside so I have a hard time expressing it, y’know. Whereas in French, it talks/I talk more easily and I speak up right away . . . I know that, well I remember that in Portugal speaking frankly to someone, telling him, “We don’t know each other. You shouldn’t talk to me like that.” Very calmly. The person understood quickly . . . The problem was solved or they understood that they were dealing with someone who didn’t want to get into whatever stories like that weren’t important and who didn’t want to get angry, y’know . . . [In French] I tend to get angry and get carried away more easily and then it ends up badly because we don’t have, we have, I don’t get to the end of the- I always want to have the last word, et cetera, so, y’know . . . I can’t stand vulgar words in Portuguese . . . so it’s out of the question for me to say them, y’know . . . and I can’t stand it, so that’s what makes me calm down and tell myself . . . this desire to have the last word at the end, in Portuguese, I can calm it down more easily because in fact I realize that the person isn’t expecting my reaction at all, reacting positively and trying to be calm, so it goes down easily . . . so there’s no problem. Whereas

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here [in France], no. I get as angry as the other person I’m with . . . and we get carried away in ridiculous stuff, y’know . . . [In Portuguese] I put right away in my head I tell myself, “No I’m going to go at it calmly, we’re going to explain ourselves.”

From this excerpt, we get the sense that Luisa doesn’t swear and assert herself as much in Portuguese, as a strategic choice. Rather than merely a question of ability, she does not want to be vulgar in Portuguese, and the consequence is that she ends up being more diplomatic in Portuguese settings. This further highlights the necessity of looking at these women’s differences in “vocabulary” as a matter not only of what they are able to do and be in each language, but also as a matter of what they feel willing or entitled to do and be. From these multiple understandings of what emotional expression involves—a release of an inner energy, or the execution of interactional feats, through which the speaker will be perceived and then maybe perceive herself in a particular light, most recognize that affective expression requires semiotic resources. These speakers acknowledge that they have access to different resources in each language—through a combination of ability and willingness. Thus we see that even when speakers articulated more psychological accounts of how their bilingualism affects them, at times they still found themselves invoking partially pragmatic, contextual accounts of how language functions. Conclusion These self-reports reveal that speakers have quite subtle intuitions about the effects of using each language. There is considerable variability across speakers, and for the same speakers at different moments, in how they account for and where they locate the source of the different feeling—in the two languages (always described as separate bounded codes), in the “contexts” that they associate with each language or that each language summons up (usually described as situated in either French or Portuguese national territory), in the “character” of Portuguese or French speakers, or in their own “doubled” personalities. Such introspective accounts may not yield a transparent view of how speakers may be different. However, they do tell us something about what speakers infer about themselves from how they talk. Similarly, analysts might take issue with how these participants parcel out language, context, and user as separate variables, or personality as underlying. One might also query participants’ attributing causal force to any one of these variables. That these speakers split language, self, and context into separable entities may itself be an effect of linguistic habits shared with many Europeans and Americans, who tend to transform complex processes into noun-like “things” (Whorf 1940/1956; Rosenberg 1990). Participants’ remarks, informed as they are by multiple local language ideologies of identity, language, place,

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emotion, and interaction, nevertheless provide insight into their understandings of the relationships between language and self. That said, as analysts, we should think more about what is producing these effects for speakers. As has been noted (Silverstein 1981; Woolard 1998a), pragmatic dimensions of language are often the most difficult for participants to articulate. My requests that participants discuss how each language makes them feel were in essence requests for their explicit metapragmatic reflections about what each language indexes (Silverstein 1976/1995)—how it either creates new contexts by its very use (a different sense of self or way of interacting), or how it presupposes an already existing “reality” (a “mentality” or a different “personality”). Participants’ capacities to do this are inconsistent. It is much easier for people to answer the question, “is something different when you speak each language?” than to say with certainty what that something is and what it means. We saw how they waffled among more referential, contextual, and psychological accounts of how speaking their two languages affects them.10 What to make of the fact that some women report these shifts as a change in personality, whereas others as just a shift in behavior and feeling? Are these different interpretations of the same experience of how the two languages’ creatively indexical power evokes and invokes other contexts and their associated modes of interacting and experiencing for participants? In part it depends on what the participants themselves mean by personality, relative to how they understand contextual shifts in behavior and experience. Are the latter felt to summon up different aspects of self or taken to be relatively superficial, trivial “noise” relative to their belief in a more static sense of their own identities? Although some participants invoke the psychological construct of personality themselves, personality may be one vernacular way of describing pragmatic actions of self and other more generally (see Crapanzano 1992).11 However, if personality, even as academic psychologists may intend it, is not, on some level, manifest in patterns of using language, then it is unclear how anyone, scholar or not, could report on it. In chapters 5 and 6, I talk specifically about the actual discourse patterns these speakers produce in each language that, in some way, may underlie these reported experiences of difference. One can then continue to ask about the significance of these actual differences, relative to participants’ experiences of them. Is this the stuff of different “emotions” and “personalities”? If not, what is it? What are “emotions” and “personality” if not related to how they are discursively enacted and interpreted?

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1

There are two participants, Catarina and Andreia, who participated only in this part of the study, not in the study of narrative performances. They share similar backgrounds to the other participants. For this reason they have been included in this portion of the study. Both women were very eager to talk to me generally about their experiences with both languages, but were unable to participate in other portions of the study. 2 Following Labov (1972a), the more metalinguistically oriented tasks, such as those reported in this chapter, were conducted after those intended to elicit more spontaneous “vernacular” speech. I nonetheless have organized my discussion to present speakers’ explicit commentaries about language and identity first, in order to explore their beliefs about the relations between language and identity, before focusing on their use of French and Portuguese discourse forms in chapters 5 and 6. 3 Because of space limitations, these commentaries are only provided in English translation. The materials in the original languages are available by contacting the author. 4 See Pavlenko 2006b for a discussion of how bilinguals are implicitly aware and yet may distance themselves from the belief that bilingualism could lead to clinically recognized disorders, such as multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia. 5 This contrasts markedly with perceptions of Portuguese noted by nonmigrant French speakers studied by Billiez (1996), for whom Portuguese is monotonous and not “beautiful.” 6 More extended discussion of the reasons for this divergence appears in chapter 6. 7 One reviewer asked about how such discourses circulate. See Pavlenko (2006b) for a discussion of the notion of bilingualism as producing schizophrenia. 8 Participants focused more on anger. It would be interesting in future work to compare systematically how they talked about other emotions, such as affection, fear, etc. 9 This is translated from tu me prends la gueule. tu me fais chier. 10 One may wonder how and where these different ideologies of language have circulated, so that these women are able to draw upon them as resources (and constraints) in their accounts. Indeed, as noted by Silverstein (1976/1995, 1981) and Crapanzano (1990, 1992), referentialist accounts of language predominate in much of western scholarship, and in more generalized folk beliefs. One does however want to exercise caution before asserting a single language ideology for any population. Bauman and Briggs (2003) and Taylor (1985), for example, note the multiple sources of “modern,” western language ideologies, from the more referential and decontextualized perspective of Locke to the more romantic and expressivist perspective of Herder. Presumably participants can draw on these different ideologies in different ways, in different contexts, as did the participants in this study. More research should be done to explore the multiplicity and contention (Gal 1998) of “western” ideologies of language for a variety of “western” participants, in a number of contexts. This will allow scholars to avoid “occidentalizing” the “west” in monolithic terms (Carrier 1992). 11 It has been argued that even academic notions of personality are informed by folk notions of the concept (Crapanzano 1992).

CHAPTER 5 ENACTING BILINGUAL SELVES IN NARRATIVE: NARRATIVE ELICITATION AND ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK

This chapter and chapter 6 explore how the different language-based experiences of identity and affect that bilingual speakers reported in chapter 4 are grounded in patterns of specific discourse practices that these speakers routinely use. By investigating how speakers’ intuitions that they feel different in French and Portuguese manifest themselves in their actual language use, I determine what speakers are actually “doing” in their French and Portuguese spoken discourse that may contribute to their different subjective experiences. Although there are many verbal genres where one could study bilinguals’ discursive displays of self and affect, I focus here on narratives of personal experience. To see how these bilinguals display self and affect in each language, I explore whether they “do” self-narration differently in their two languages. My approach draws from recent scholarship that examines first-person narrative as a medium in which social and personal identities are enacted or performed (Bamberg 1997a, 1997b; Hill 1995a; Johnstone 1997b; KellerCohen and Dyer 1997; Koven 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004b; Linde 1997; Miller, Fung, and Mintz 1990; Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001; Schiffrin 1996; Wortham 1999, 2000, 2001). More specifically, I adopt an analytic approach to the enactment of identity in narrative first described in Koven (2002, 2004b), which builds on Labov’s notion of evaluation (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972b), Ducrot’s notion of polyphony (1980, 1984), Goffman’s notion of footing and production format (1974/1986, 1979/1981), and Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and voicing (1981, 1986). Drawing heavily from the latter two authors, I assume that speakers’ narrative enactments of identity are not singular or monolithic. Instead, such enactments involve performance of and commentary upon multiple socially and spatiotemporally (here-and-now, there-and-then) locatable guises or voices of selves and others. These voices become “trackable” through systematic attention to patterns of readily identifiable sets of linguistic indexes (Ochs 1990, 1992; Peirce 1940; Silverstein 1976/1995). By examining such indexical patterns, I then systematically compare the combinations of voices that speakers perform in French and Portuguese. This comparative analysis of speakers’ voicing/footing strategies will reveal whether they sys-

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tematically use different French and Portuguese narrative strategies that underlie their subjective experience of difference in each language. Therefore in addition to allowing us to see how bilinguals enact different identities in their two languages, the following analysis also provides new ways of systematically applying Bakhtin and Goffman to analyze speakers’ stances in narrative more generally. Most scholarship on voicing/footing in oral narrative has undertaken qualitative analysis of a handful of narrative excerpts at a time.1 In the current work, I analyze participants’ voicing across a corpus of over five hundred narratives. My approach therefore innovates by allowing for systematic, quantitative analysis of the patterns of voicing/footing across a large corpus of materials. As such, it adds greater systematization to Bakhtinian and Goffmanian approaches to identity in oral narrative. Rationale for Presenting Study of Bilinguals’ Narrative Identities across Two Chapters The presentation of a coding scheme that operationalizes voicing/footing in order to understand bilinguals’ discursively enacted identities in two languages poses considerable intellectual and writing challenges. Beyond the study of bilingual identities, the current framework for narrative analysis contributes in its own right to several traditions of narrative analysis that address the sociopragmatic “meanings” of first-person stories.2 As such, because my approach to narrative analysis is rather involved and potentially taxing to readers with lesser interest in the linguistic detail, I first present the overall analytic framework for analyzing voicing in a stand-alone chapter. This chapter lays out the methods of elicitation, analytic categories, and coding scheme, subsequently applied to the corpora of twenty-three speakers in two languages. My purpose in presenting this approach in so much detail is so that others can apply, amend, and build upon it as a more general approach to analyzing narrative voicing. Therefore, unlike the study of speakers’ intuitions reported in chapter 4 and that of others’ perceptions of the same speakers in two languages in chapter 7, the study of bilinguals’ enacted identities has been broken down into two chapters. Chapter 6 then presents the results of the application of this framework to the bilingual narrative corpus, with examples. An additional chapter devoted to this portion of the study does not imply that this part of the book is more important than the other two (speakers’ selfreports and others’ perceptions). Rather, this analysis takes more space to present because the analytic categories require considerable elaboration. All three analyses (self-report, discursive enactment, others’ perceptions) are needed to illuminate bilingual identities as comprehensively as possible. Chapter 5 therefore is organized as follows: first describing the procedures through which I collected French and Portuguese narrative corpora, then de-

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scribing how I systematically coded the twenty-three speakers’ French and Portuguese narratives for the everyday indexical strategies involved in voicing. Specifically, my described coding scheme allows one to examine how people present here-and-now and there-and-then perspectives from narrating and narrated events. This is possible when one identifies the combinations of speaker roles (narrator, interlocutor, and character) that speakers use in French and Portuguese, and the socially marked ways of speaking that they use within and across these roles. This framework, presented in this chapter, thus systematically operationalizes Bakhtin’s notion of voicing for the analysis of a corpus of first-person oral narratives. After having presented the framework, I then report in chapter 6 the results of these analyses that show how people privilege particular perspectives of current and past self and others more when speaking in French or Portuguese. Method The materials presented in this chapter come from a study I conducted in Paris during the winter and spring of 1995.3 In this study, I collected stories of personal experience told twice—once in French and once in Portuguese—from the same twenty-three participants whose self-reports were discussed in chapter 4. An in-depth discussion of the ethnographic backgrounds of these participants appears in chapter 3. Each interview consisted of two tasks: first, an elicitation of stories of several different kinds of personal experience in French or Portuguese; second, an elicitation of the same stories in the other language. The order in which interviewees told stories, French-Portuguese, or Portuguese-French, was varied to avoid an order effect. All interviews were then audio- and video-recorded and then transcribed verbatim.4 The tapes and transcripts were reviewed for accuracy by other French-Portuguese bilinguals. The disciplinarily hybrid method of the controlled portion of this study is informed by the sociolinguistic interview as understood by Labov (1972a, 1972b) and ongoing ethnographic work that allowed me to set up recordable situations that would be as conducive as possible to the kinds of engaged, informal storytelling in which people ordinarily participate. As Briggs (1986) urges, when taking elicitation techniques to the field, researchers should be mindful of how the interactional genre of the research interview might be construed within local communicative norms. I had spent a good deal of time with these same people in their daily lives, watching them use both languages in naturalistic contexts and asking them about how it felt to use each language. These observations helped me to plan structured interviews that participants would not find too unnatural. And thus, I sought to approximate informal conversation between peers, as close as possible to real peer-group story-telling, yet still maintain control to make within and across person comparisons possi-

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ble. I addressed this question systematically, through interviews that were carefully designed to feel casual to the speaker, and yet still be controlled enough to facilitate comparability.5 Peer Interviewers To evoke as much as possible an atmosphere of natural conversation among peers, in two languages, I asked each speaker to tell her stories each time to a different female French-Portuguese bilingual of the same age and sociolinguistic background, selected to be her plausible social peer. For the controlled story elicitations, I thus chose native speaker Luso-descendants as interviewers. Although I was already known to most of the Luso-descendants whom I interviewed, my Portuguese communicative competence (Hymes 1972) was unambiguously different from theirs. I did not want my status as a non-Lusodescendant researcher to influence the naturalness of their expression in French and Portuguese. As most of the people whom I interviewed participated in Portuguese associations with other Luso-descendants, it was common for them to interact with other Luso-descendants in both languages. All interviewees immediately knew that interviewers were also Luso-descendants—another solidaritycreating piece of knowledge. With Luso-descendant interviewers, speakers knew they shared certain cultural and sociolinguistic experiences and competencies. Furthermore, even among previously unacquainted Luso-descendants, there is social pressure to speak informally. Each interviewer had also been interviewed before becoming an interviewer. Kinds of Stories Elicited From my ethnographic sense of the kinds of stories Luso-descendant peers ordinarily tell each other, I chose several general story topics likely to elicit engaged narration, and to create as naturalistic an interview situation as possible. Labov’s particular “danger of death” story genre (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972a, 1972b) was not salient for this population. I picked a range of topics, from the less to the more engaging and self-revealing. These general topics were picked to be sufficiently broad, so that speakers could easily think of narratable experiences.6 Participants were asked for stories about times when they laughed hysterically, stories about times when they were very afraid, stories about bad experiences with a relative stranger (such as encounters with bureaucrats or unpleasant people on public transportation), and stories about bad experiences with people they did know well, either family or friends, in both French and Portuguese contexts. Stories that originally occurred in both countries were elicited, in order to make sure to obtain examples of incidents that had originally occurred in both languages. Therefore people told a minimum of 6 stories each, two times, resulting in at least 12

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narratives. Because I wanted comparable sets of first-person stories in each language from which within-subject analyses would be performed, the total number of stories each person told varied. That is, if people had multiple stories to tell for a particular topic, or additional stories on other topics, they were encouraged to tell those as well. What mattered most was that each story was repeated in each language. Together these speakers yielded a coded corpus of 476 stories. This translates into a mean of 20.6 stories of personal experience per speaker, or the “same” 10.3 stories told twice (SD 2.7). Story Elicitations During the actual storytellings, only one interviewer and interviewee were present in the room. I had previously explained to the interviewee that the interviewer would ask her to tell about a variety of everyday experiences in one language. Because many Luso-descendants express concern or linguistic insecurity (Labov 1972a, 1972b) about their Portuguese, I reassured them that neither the interviewer nor I was interested in judging their Portuguese. I instructed the interviewers to be as casual and appreciative as possible, making back-channeling sounds to show their interest, but otherwise to yield the floor to the storyteller as much as possible.7 Interviewers’ requests for different story topics were worded in a colloquial style. After each story, the interviewer would jot down a key word for the story. After this first session, the first interviewer was replaced by the second who then used the list of keywords to jog the storyteller’s memory of specific experiences she had just narrated. The second interviewer would do this in the other language by saying, for example, “You told X about a bad experience in the metro, can you tell me what happened?” The order in which speakers told stories, French-Portuguese or Portuguese-French was varied, as was the language in which each interviewer conducted interviews. Most participants seemed at ease during each part of the interview.8 This two-part interview lasted between thirty and ninety minutes. For each speaker, I have approximately sixty minutes of storytelling talk (30 minutes x 2), or a total of twenty-three hours for the twenty-three speakers. Each storytelling session in each language lasted approximately thirty minutes. As noted above, half of these speakers told stories first in French, then in Portuguese; the other half told stories first in Portuguese then in French.9 Analytic Categories In this section, I describe how these French and Portuguese stories were analyzed and compared. Comparing discursive strategies for self-presentation across languages presents challenges, whether it involves a comparison of two different groups of people or a comparison of the same person in two contexts. The analyst must decide how to make different performances and contexts

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analytically comparable. Presented below are the codes and explanations of their rationales, to demonstrate how I compared discursive strategies speakers use to display persona and affect in French and Portuguese narratives. The approach I adopted involves identifying how speakers use strategies of voicing (Bakhtin 1981) to display persona and affective stances in oral French and Portuguese first-person narratives. More specifically, to conduct a comparative analysis of bilinguals’ voicing patterns in their two languages, the speaker role perspectives present in narratives told in speakers’ two languages are compared, as well as how speakers present personas within and across the different roles. This involves identifying the speech registers used within and across speaker roles. This analysis allows comparison of how speakers present guises of self and other in the here-and-now of the interview and as there-andthen characters in a story. How I analyze speaker role, register, and the relationships between role and register is explained in detail below. Speaker Roles The notion of speaker role combines aspects of Labov’s notion of evaluation (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972b, 1997), Ducrot’s notion of polyphony (1980, 1984), Goffman’s idea of footing and production format (1979/1981), and Bakhtin’s notion of voicing (1981), as well as more recent applications (Hill 1995a; Keane 1999; Koven 2002, 2004b; Wortham 2001). From these different perspectives, I adopt the notion that people do not express a unified, monolithic subjectivity when they talk. Any study of discursively displayed identity and affect should take into account the multiple roles through which any individual may talk within a given utterance and throughout an entire narrative, including how that individual can simultaneously animate and evaluate perspectives of others or of earlier versions of herself, distinct from her perspective in the here-and-now. A coherent sense of a speaker’s identity and affective stance thus emerges from the overall, heteroglossic (Bakhtin 1981) orchestration of different here-and-now, there-andthen, self and other speaker roles. Other frameworks have identified different aspects or numbers of speaker roles in a number of cultural contexts (Goffman 1979/1981; Hill 1995a; Irvine 1996b; Levinson 1988; Moore 1993). For example, Hill (1995a) identified as many as twenty different voices of self and other in Don Gabriel’s narrative about his son’s murder. Below (and as discussed at greater length in Koven 2002), I identify three primary speaker roles in first-person narratives of personal experience told by French-Portuguese bilinguals—narrator, interlocutor, and character. Speakers take on these different roles and role combinations as they move among three different speech event frames. How speakers deploy combinations of these roles produces distinct types of self-presentation. First, there is the event of narration itself, in which the

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speaker takes on the role of storyteller, obtaining an extended turn at talk in which he/she narrates. Here the relevant speaker role is that of narrator. Second, there is the larger context of the interview or conversation in which the stories are told. Here the relevant speaker roles are those of coconversationalists or interlocutors. Finally, there is the narrated speech event, which is presupposed and invoked in the event of narration. Here the relevant speaker roles are those of the narratable and performable characters. These three roles can be inhabited separately, or simultaneously in doublevoiced utterances (Bakhtin 1981), when a stretch of speech includes more than one speech-event frame and speaker role. If one includes these three primary roles when they appear alone (narrator, interlocutor, character), and when they are combined (narrator-interlocutor, narrator-character, interlocutor-character), this yields six different speaker roles. These roles are described below, and are also summarized in table 5.1. The entire corpus of narratives was coded for speaker role inhabitance following this framework. 1. Narrator Role The first speaker role perspective is that of narrator. This role is instantiated when a speaker takes an extended turn at talk, assuming responsibility to an audience for telling a story (Bauman 1977, 1986). In this role, the speaker uses deictics that situate her as a participant in both the narrating and narrated events. This role is similar to Hill’s discussion of the narrator voice N in Don Gabriel’s narrative, and is “distinguished . . . by being neutral, divorced from the I-thou world of direct address and belonging entirely to the narrative world, functioning to sustain the narrative main line and to give material orientation” (1995a:134). The narrator role typically involves past tense (or historical present) narration, in which the speaker describes events through a series of “temporally ordered past-tense clauses” (Labov and Waletzky 1967). In colloquial, oral French and Portuguese, these tenses include the passé composé (French)10 or the preterite (Portuguese), the imperfect (French and Portuguese), the pluperfect (French and Portuguese), and the historical present (French and, to some extent, Portuguese). The excerpt below appears primarily in the narrator role, as the speaker relates events in a clearly past story world, with all the conjugated verbs (italicized in excerpt) appearing in a past tense. Excerpt 5.1 Narrative told primarily from narrator role French c’était mon père qui voulait dépasser un camion, et à ce moment-là, il y a eu une voiture qui est arrivée, et j’ai, on a eu le temps de se rabattre sur la droite, et euh, ça, ça m’a fait peur. souvent, en voiture, j’avais eu des frayeurs comme ça.

English Translation it was my father who wanted to pass a truck, and at that moment, there was a car that came, and I, we had the time to turn back to the right, and uh, that, that scared me. often, in the car, I ‘d had frights like that.

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In this example, the speaker presents a series of sequentially ordered events with a combination of past tenses (passé composé, imparfait, plus-queparfait). The speaker presents these narrated events in such a way that clearly reveals the plot of the narrated event. She tells us about what transpired—how this near-accident happened, and even how she reacted at the time. However, she presents these events as having occurred at a place and time distinct from the current event of speaking. With a fair degree of narrative detachment, she refrains from either current commentary or re-performance of these events. 2. Interlocutory Role As noted by Labov (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972b, 1997), personal storytellers rarely talk about their experiences from an exclusively narrator role perspective. A story emerges from, responds to, and alters an ongoing interaction—the larger context of the interaction (e.g., interview, conversation, et cetera) in which the story is told. Thus, the second role perspective is that of current, here-and-now interlocutor. It is in this role that speakers engage in what Bauman (1986:98–101) and Babcock (1977) have called metanarration, the “overtly and explicitly social interactional elements of discourse . . . [that] have the effect of bridging the gap between the narrated event and the storytelling event by reaching out phatically to the audience, giving identificational and participatory immediacy to the story” (Bauman 1986: 99–100).11 It is in this role that speakers display interpersonal rapport and affect, conveying their attitudes toward the narrated events and the ongoing interaction. This interlocutory role may continue to either interrupt or intersect with other roles. Within the interlocutory role, speakers use a combination of languagespecific, indexical devices. To determine which French and Portuguese speech forms may index the speaker’s inhabitance of the interlocutory role, I examined my corpus of nearly five hundred stories of personal experience in French and Portuguese for devices through which speakers marked their current stance, and thus deviated from strict expository narration. Such deviations are evident when the speaker uses forms that allow her to either break from the advancement of plot or add something to her narrative that accomplishes more than the development of plot (Da Piedade Moreira de Sá 1999, 2001; Dionísio 1994; Labov 1972a; Piaget 1998; Polanyi 1979, 1985). From my French and Portuguese corpora, these included the following nine interlocutory devices: 2.1 Parenthetical remarks that break the narrative frame to make a comment to the listener (Bauman 1986; Babcock 1977). A speaker may actually step out of the storytelling frame, making explicitly here-and-now comments, often completely outside of the narrative frame. Speakers often use the referential indexicality of verb tense to show they are departing from straight narration. The parenthetical remark has been boldfaced in the original and the translation

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Excerpt 5.2 Example of interlocutory parenthetical French c’est vrai que j’étais peut-être effectivement un peu nationaliste.

English translation it’s true that I was maybe indeed a little nationalistic.

Goffman (1974/1986) discusses such here-and-now framings where the “present” “I” reflects back on a past “I.” A clause of speech that clearly comes from the speaker’s current stance or that appears in a nomic, “tenseless” present (Silverstein 1976/1995, 1993) was coded as one instance of a parenthetical remark. In the example above, with the verb tense in “It’s true,” the speaker may mean to calibrate the utterance either to the current moment of speaking (it’s true now), or she may calibrate the utterance to some supposedly timeless state of affairs (it’s always true). Ducrot (1980) and Borrillo (2004) discuss different types of interlocutory parentheticals for French, whereas Carreira (1997) and Dionísio (1994) discuss these for Portuguese. 2.2. Marked register usages (Myers-Scotton 2001) are also called initiative shifts (Bell 1984), metaphorical (Blom and Gumperz 1972), or creatively indexical switches (Silverstein 1976/1995) to other registers or languages that nonreferentially index speaker affect and/or social identity above and beyond the referent they pick out. By shifting to a different register (lower or higher, or code-switching to another language), speakers may creatively instantiate a different attitude or affect toward the events narrated, or reframe their relation to their interlocutor.12 Interlocutory use of marked register has been boldfaced. Excerpt 5.3 Example of marked register interlocutory device French il y avait du monde. j’en avais rien à foutre.

English Translation there were a lot of people. I didn’t give a damn/fuck.

By saying “I didn’t give a damn/fuck,” the speaker does more than describe her indifference. With her lexical choices, she indexes something about what she currently makes of the narrated event and/or of her current interaction with her listener. 2.3. Intensifiers that do not merely refer to quantity or size, but rather index speaker affect As Labov (1984) points out, although quantifying intensifiers may explicitly describe quantity, they may also serve to “quantify” a speaker’s gradient affective involvement. Although Labov wrote about intensification in English, there are similar phenomena in both French (Gheorghiu 1989, 1991; Piaget 1998:75) and Portuguese (Carreira 1997; Díonisio 1994; Oliveira 1962;

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Rudolph 1990; Skorge 1956-1957). The intensifiers in the following excerpt have been boldfaced. Excerpt 5.4 Example of interlocutory use of intensifiers Portuguese começou a mandar vir, mas à sério

English Translation he started yelling at me, but really

Here, the intensifier marks interlocutory role occupancy, as it serves more than the referential function of specifying quantity, but also the interactional function of indexing the speaker’s current affective stance. 2.4. Discourse markers or interactional particles that mark interpersonal or affective stance, rather than logical, propositional relations between referential components Discourse markers can be used to mark logical connections between segments of talk, but can also be used for purely interactional purposes—to maintain a turn at talk, or to mark the speaker’s stance (Schiffrin 1987; Maynard 1989; Dickel Dunn 1999). For French, there is an extensive literature on the interlocutory functions of different discourse markers (Auchlin 1981; Barbéris 1995; Beeching 2002; Brémond 2004; Caron-Pargue and Caron 1995; Delierre 1997; Ducrot 1980, 1984; Fleischman and Yaguello 2004; Hansen 1995). There is a relatively smaller scholarly literature on discourse markers in European Portuguese (Carreira 1997; Lima 2002). Only those discourse markers that are clearly not part of the advancement of the plot can be considered interlocutory. Discourse markers in the following excerpt have been boldfaced. Excerpt 5.5 Interlocutory use of discourse markers French c’est vrai que j’étais peut-être effectivement un peu nationaliste, bon, il y en avait que pour le Portugal, bon, et bon, et puis bon c’est des choses, je veux dire, c’est, ça passe, ça revient, quoi.

English Translation it’s true that I was maybe indeed a bit nationalistic, okay, there was only Portugal, okay, and okay. and then, okay it’s things, I mean, it’s, it passes, it comes back, okay.

This speaker uses discourse markers when discussing what appears to be an affectively laden topic. Here, although the different discourse markers may have different functions, her overall use of these discourse markers points to something about her current assessment of the events she describes and/or her negotiation of how to tell these events to her current interlocutor. 2.5 Shifts to a second-person pronoun to invite the audience to identify with the teller A speaker may directly appeal to her audience, either in or outside of

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the story frame. This is often done by using a second-person pronoun, when a first-person pronoun might seem most logical. O’Connor (1994) refers to this strategy in English as an attempt to get the audience to identify with the teller, and also perhaps a teller’s attempt to de-personalize her first-person experience. Drescher (2004) discusses this strategy for French. Interlocutory uses of the second-person pronoun have been boldfaced in the excerpt below. Excerpt 5.6 Interlocutory use of second-person pronoun Portuguese ficas assim um bocado chateada lá nesse caso, porque são, pensavas que eram, não amigos, mas bom, pessoas que pensavas ver todos os anos lá.

English you get like this a little upset in that case, because they are, you thought they were, not friends, but okay, people that you thought [you’d] see every year there.

2.6 Laughter (Jefferson 1984) Unlike some of the other interlocutory devices, laughter is entirely devoid of propositional meaning, and serves purely to index interlocutory stance. 2.7. Gasps that index the current speaker’s attitude. Like laughter, gasps are also devoid of propositional meaning, but are conventionalized indexes of affect (Goffman 1978/1981). In the excerpt shown below, the gasp has been boldfaced. Excerpt 5.7 Interlocutory Gasp. French moi, ça , ((gasp)), ça m’énerve profondément.

English me, that ((gasp)), that makes me deeply angry.

2.8. Interjections which contribute only to indexing affect and nothing to reference (Goffman 1978/1981; Jakobson 1960). 2.9. Sighs Like gasps, and interjections, sighs have no referential meaning. They only serve to communicate stance. Although these nine devices comprise a larger set than is frequently given in discussions of the pragmatic effects of discourse forms, it is not exhaustive. In particular, beyond laughter, gasps, and sighs, other prosodic and paralinguistic markers or contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982), such as pitch, stress, lengthening, and volume are not included, nor are visual elements such as gaze, gesture, or facial expressions. Attention to other vocal and nonvocal cues that accompany and are an integral part of interlocutory role perform-

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ances may complement or complicate this framework in future work. In table 5.1, descriptions of some of the devices from my corpus are provided. As interlocutory devices frequently function nonreferentially, their relative presence or absence may not change the content or plot of the story, but affect its overall “feel.” Compare, in the example below the difference between the amounts of interlocutory speech in two versions of the “same” story. The two versions of stories are presented side by side, with comparable segments parallel. English translations appear below, presented in the same manner. The different interlocutory devices are boldfaced in both versions. Excerpt 5.8 Two versions of same story with different amounts of interlocutory devices. French M: bon, y avait un, y avait un cousin à moi, mais bon, il était pas en état d’assurer quoi que ce soit, P: mh M: et euh, la personne qui devait nous ramener, quoi, avait trop bu, et euh tout le monde avait été bien gai, quoi, et euh, et bon euh, c’ét-, c’était assez, euh, ‘fin moi, j’avais peur (.) j’avais aucune P: bien sûr M: confiance avec eux et euh,et puis bon, comment, comment on allait rentrer, tout ça, et bon, c’est des souvenirs, c’est c’est le genre de situation qui malheureusement arrive assez souvent. English translation of French M: well, there was a, there was a cousin of mine, but well, he wasn’t in a state to take over anything, P: mh M: and uh the person who was supposed to take us back, like, had had too much to drink, and uh everyone had been quite merry, like, and uh, and okay uh, it w- it was kind of uh, well I was afraid (.) I had no P: of course M: trust in them and uh and then okay, how, how we were

Portuguese M: tinha um primo meu, mas prontos (.) e eles beberam (.) beberam e num ‘tavam em condições de levar o carro,

e eu não qu’ria vir com eles.

English translation of Portuguese M: I had a cousin of mine, but okay (.) and they drank (.) they drank and weren’t in a condition to take the car,

and I didn’t want to go with them.

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going to get home, all that, and well, it’s memories, it’s, it’s the kind of situation that unfortunately happens rather often.

Note how in the French version, this speaker uses a combination of discourse markers (quoi, bon,’fin, tout ça) that serve purely interlocutory functions, that is, they do not mark logical relations within the narrative, nor do they serve to further the plot. Also note her use of intensifiers (quoi que ce soit, aucune, bien, assez, tout le monde) that could serve referential functions of specifying quantities, but seem in these instances to function every bit as much as indexes of this speaker’s current stance toward what she is narrating. And finally in the end, note how she completely steps out of the story frame to make a general comment to her listener. Unlike the French, the Portuguese version contains almost straight expository narration (with the exception of the one discourse marker prontos, and the relatively high register condições). Therefore, although the actual events narrated are virtually identical in the two tellings, the different amounts of interlocutory speech make the two versions quite different. Throughout the narratives, I coded the presence of all interlocutory devices, as well as the presence of each type of device. From this, I was able to compute the overall percentage of clauses in the interlocutory role across each speaker’s French and Portuguese narrative corpora, as well as the relative presence of different types of interlocutory devices. From this I report the relative amounts of interlocutory speech overall, between French and Portuguese, as well as the different sets of devices used in each language within the interlocutory role in each language. 3. Character Role Finally, the third speaker role is that of character. Telling a story of personal experience frequently involves the representation of past speech events, often as accounts of who said what to whom, how, and to what effect. In this way, people do not only speak in a here-and-now capacity, as current interlocutors, but also have themselves and others speak as quoted characters. In the character role, speakers replay the thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds of characters from the narrated event, through various modes of reported speech. Indeed, quoted utterances are often the essential kernel or punch line of a narrative (Bauman 1986). By coding character role speech relative to speech in the other two roles, one will determine how speakers echo voices of multiple selves and others in their stories in both languages. Reported speech has been discussed as having the same “involvementcreating” (Tannen 1989) function as the interlocutory strategies described above. Indeed, high densities of character speech are likely to make a story come across as particularly animated. However, some scholars have talked

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about reported speech as a somewhat different type of strategy through which speakers may communicate their current affective stance in less semiotically “transparent” and therefore perhaps more potent ways (Berman 1999; Besnier 1992; Georgakapoulou 1997). In the current model, reported speech is a vehicle for voicing (Bakhtin 1981), different from that of the interlocutory devices described above. It does not directly index the current speaker’s affect per se, but presents characters from the narrated event in such a way that may invite participants to identify with or judge such characters in a particular light. Quotation is of further significance, because through it, speakers can evoke and invoke, inhabit, or comment upon specific, recognizable sociocultural identities from contexts beyond the here-and-now of the immediate interaction. Following Bakhtin (1981), quoted characters are one of the more potent vehicles that people use to both evoke the local social universe and comment on the various positions and actors within it. Quotation has thus been discussed as a pivotal site for seeing how speakers can incarnate potentially multiple, alternative versions of self (Drescher 2004; Ochs and Capps 1996; Urban 1989; Wortham 2001) or of calibrating the distance between self and completely separate cultural others (Bauman 1986; Hill 1995a; Koven 2001; Miller and Sperry 1987; Miller, Fung, and Mintz 1990; Schiffrin 1996; Silverstein 1993, 1994, 1996b). In this way, quoted characters may be made to come alive as locally imaginable types of people. As such, speakers do not simply quote characters to replay what someone may have actually said, but rather to position themselves and others as particular kinds of social actors. Speakers make their quoted characters sound like culturally imaginable types, by adopting a way of speaking that points to shared images of such types. In this way, quotation tends to accomplish its semiotic effects through social iconicity and indexicality (Koven 2001). With this overview of the importance of character speech, I now specify the different aspects of character speech that I coded: its presence and amount (how much character speech?), its perspective (whether self or other was quoted, and to whom the quoted character was speaking), and its register (how/like whom were they made to speak?). These analyses will reveal how different characters are portrayed as well as the relationships among characters. I will then compare global differences in how speakers evoke characters in their two languages, as a way to compare their French and Portuguese verbal enactments of identity. How to identify the presence and amount of character speech? Speakers use the deictics of verb tense, spatiotemporal adverbs, and pronouns to indicate whether an utterance is being presented primarily from the perspective of the quoted character or from the perspective of the narrator. In this way, the speaker can make come alive a context different from that of the immediate interaction. In the excerpt below, character speech has been underlined.

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Excerpt 5.9 Character speech Portuguese disse-me assim quando veio-me buscar assim, “tenho uma surpresa para ti.”

English Translation he said to me like that when he came to get me like that, “I have a surprise for you.”

In this example of direct quotation in Portuguese, the deictics in the quoted utterances (verb tense and pronouns) are presented from the perspective of the quoted speaker. For example, the first-person present-tense verb (tenho in Portuguese) presents the speech as if from the quoted speaker’s point of view. Overall amounts of character speech can then be compared between French and Portuguese.13 Information about character role speech yields insight into a speaker’s strategies for making narrated social worlds come alive in richly heteroglossic ways (Bakhtin 1981). By comparing speakers’ character presentational strategies in French and Portuguese, we learn further about their displays of different voices of selves and others in their two languages. 4. Double Voiced Speaker Roles Narrative discourse, like language use in general, is multifunctional (Jakobson 1960; Silverstein 1976/1995). Speakers can thus “double voice” (Bakhtin 1981) a stretch of narrative discourse, simultaneously inhabiting more than one role. In this way, the very same stretch of discourse can serve to further the development of the plot, index interlocutory involvement, and/or perform a character. Each of the three roles can thus be performed alone, or simultaneously with the other two roles. For example, in indirect quotation, the narrator perspective is combined with that of the quoted character. (Coulmas 1986; Longacre 1983; Lucy 1993a; Voloshinov 1973). If a speaker combines plot advancement and current commentary, this is an example of interlocutor-narrator double voicing. A speaker may thus shift into this interlocutory mode within the storytelling frame, by layering narrator speech with interlocutory here-and-now commentary. That is, with the same words, the speaker tells us what happened in the past and what she currently makes of it. In particular, chunks of discourse that include interlocutory devices such as register shifts and intensifiers frequently function in both interlocutory and narrator modes. Thus, in addition to the role these forms play in describing past events, they also point to the speaker’s current attitude. Character and interlocutor speech can be simultaneous, if the speaker talks in such a way so that her current interlocutory attitude has become fully collapsed or superimposed upon that of a character (Silverstein 1993; Wortham 2001). This is similar to Besnier’s discussion of how speech reporters may in-

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directly “leak” their own affectively laden attitudes onto their parodied renditions of others’ words (Besnier 1992). Such doubly codable instances often come across as particularly emotionally intense.14 5. Summary of Speaker Role Framework With this framework, one can look for similarities and differences in the relative presence of these speaker roles in stories told in each language. By seeing how and how much speakers perform and move among these roles, this framework allows one to analyze and compare perspectives and stances across storytellings, across languages. As described, one can predict that stories with higher proportions of interlocutory and character role speech are likely to come across as more affectively engaged, relative to stories presented primarily in narrator role speech. To talk about speakers’ presentations of self and other in narratives in two languages, I will then be looking for consistencies and differences in patterns of narrative alignments and reenactments in stories told in each language. Table 5.1 summarizes the devices that instantiate each speaker role perspective. In the transcripts presented in this chapter and in the appendices C and E, narrator speech is italicized, interlocutory speech is bolded, and character speech is underlined. Table 5.1 Six speaker role perspectives Speaker Role

Narrator Unmarked, neutral narration

Interlocutory Commentary that breaks from and/or comments on the narrative; metanarration

Indexical devices and strategies in French and Portuguese that instantiate the role imperfect pluperfect preterite/passé composé historical present Example: tinha-le comprado uma prenda (I’d bought her a present) 1. Parenthetical or here-and-now remarks that break from the advancement of plot 2. Shifts to a marked register that nonreferentially index speaker affect and/or social identity above and beyond the referent they pick out 3. Quantifying intensifiers that do not merely refer to quantity or size, but rather index speaker affect 4. Discourse markers that do not show logical connections within the story that are not used to show logical, propositional relations between referential components

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Narrator/Interlocutory Narration with embedded interlocutory commentary; laminates markers of current interlocutory stance on to narration of plot

Character Performance of characters in direct quotation; deictics no longer point to reporting, but to reported event

Narrator/Character Performance of characters in indirect quotation; indirect quotation/free indirect discourse: deictics point to reporting event Interlocutory/Character Fusion of current stance with that of quoted character, segments for which one could attribute speech to both here-and-now speaker and to performed character

5. Shifts to a second-person pronoun in otherwise first-person narration 6. Laughter 7. Gasps 8. Interjections which contribute only to indexing affect, and contribute nothing to reference 9. Sighs Example: Et puis j’sais plus c’que, trop^ + c’qu’elle m’a dit. (And then I don’t remember what, too much^+ what she said to me.) Example: E ela chega-se só+ ao pé de mim, e cada uma+, levei* tantas+ naquele dia. (And she comes right+ up to me, and each one+[blow], I really+ got it* on that day.) Example: Puis, j’ fais,* “Ouais chuis allée t’acheter ton cadeau” (Then, I’m like,* “Yeah, I went to buy you your present”) Example: Elle m’a demandé où j’étais allée (She asked me where I’d gone) Example: E depois ela, “Onde é que tu foste, não sei o quê,^*ganana ^*” (And then she [said], “where were you, blabla,^* blabla^*”)

Italics = narrator Bold = interlocutory Underline = character Interlocutory device codes placed after occurrence of each device: ^ parenthetical/here-and-now remarks *marked register usages that nonreferentially index speaker affect and/or social identity above and beyond the referent they pick out +intensifiers that do not merely refer to quantity or size, but rather index speaker affect $ discourse markers 2 shifts to a second-person pronoun to invite the audience to identify with the teller #laughter & gasps % interjections @ sighs

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With the tripartite set of role distinctions described above (narrator, interlocutor, character), I am able to note the role perspectives from which a speaker tells stories in each language. A speaker may shift abruptly from one role to the next, weave roles together, juxtapose or even collapse them. For example, a speaker may narrate a past event quite neutrally, primarily from a narrator’s perspective. In such a story, the speaker’s current attitude toward the narrated events and toward her interlocutor, as well as any sense of the “flavor” or “color” of the narrated event would remain relatively muted, what Labov would call an unevaluated story. Speakers may also take a critical stance toward a narrated event, inviting their audience to share their current stance toward an earlier, narratively presented version of an event and themselves within it. A story told from this interlocutory perspective typically may involve a good deal of commentary from the speaker in her capacity as a current here-and-now persona, evaluating what she may have done as a narrated or performed character. Thirdly, a speaker may seem to step back into, reanimate, or reinhabit the skin of narrated personas, foregrounding the voice of performed characters. In this way, it is the speaker’s vivid enactment of the character role perspective that would emerge. Of course, there are many intermediate combinations of the performance of neutral narrator, here-and-now interlocutory, and there-and-then character perspectives. Even if the plots of two tellings of the “same” story are very similar, if speakers use the three roles to differing extents and in different combinations in each, the feel of narrative performance will be quite different. To determine whether speakers’ have language-specific narrative performances, we will use this framework to identify whether particular role perspectives dominate in either language. If there are such consistent differences, these may as one possible source of speakers’ subjective experience of difference in their two languages, reported in chapter 4. Register within Each Role After determining the relative presence of the different speaker roles, I also wanted to determine the types of socially recognized personas that speakers present within the different roles. To do this, I also investigated how speakers distribute different ways of speaking (here, registers and languages) across the different speaker roles. This allows us to more fully capture the “voices” speakers present in their French and Portuguese narratives. As sociolinguistic scholars have noted, a person’s use of multiple ways of talking (languages, dialects, registers, styles) are tools that perform identity (Eckert 2000; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003; Silverstein 1998). However, when speakers draw from a broad repertoire of sociolinguistic varieties, they do not only perform their own here-and-now interlocutory identities. As Goffman (1974) and more recent scholarship in sociolinguistics have noted, people often assume sociolinguistic voices that are not identical to their “own” (Rampton 1995;

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Coupland 2001). Speakers may artfully place different ways of speaking in the interlocutors’ and/or characters’ mouths to strategic effect, to present themselves and others as particular “types” of people. Therefore, it is important to determine not just which sociolinguistic varieties a speaker uses across the board, but in which speaker role capacity a speaker uses different registers. Therefore, one can investigate how speakers distribute different socially saturated languages across the different speaker roles—that is, what kinds of speech are put in whose mouth. For example, a speaker may never use profanity in her “own” mouth (as an interlocutor, or when performing her own character), but may do so freely when quoting others. To determine how speakers distribute different ways of speaking across speaker role, I separately coded and computed the relative percentages of registers used within the narrator/interlocutor role and those used by characters of self and others. These analyses allow us to see the range of sociolinguistic resources and associated personas that speakers distribute across the speaker roles in French and Portuguese, which together heteroglossically produce a sense of the “kind of person” the speaker is in her two languages. Below I describe how I coded register within the interlocutory and narrator roles separately from register in the character roles. 1. Global Interlocutory-Narrator Register(s) Whereas register shifts were coded as one type of interlocutory device among others (see above), one can also exhaustively categorize the registers that speakers adopt when speaking as as “oneself” in the interlocutory here-and-now, or “out of quotation.” This tells the range of ways of speaking that a speaker consistently adopts in the interlocutory and narrator guise in each language. Therefore, in addition to coding register shifts as a pointlike device, I also globally coded speakers’ repertoire of registers that they adopt in their here-and-now personas across all their nonquoted discourse (as opposed to quoted there-and-then selves and others, discussed below). One can then compare the proportions of each register occurring when speakers are unambiguously speaking in their “own” voice in French and Portuguese when not quoting themselves or others. Nonquoted (interlocutory and narrator) speech for both languages was coded for language and register, as unmarked, familiar, formal, vulgar, or other language speech. This will tell us about the images of self that speakers present as unambiguously their own in both languages. I now describe how different registers were defined, identified, and coded. Although a full discussion of the relationships between inter- and intra-speaker register variation is beyond the scope of this work, following Silverstein (1990, 1998), I use register system to refer to both the multiple ways of saying the “same” thing within the verbal repertoire (Gumperz 1968/1972) of a given speech community, and within the repertoires of individual speakers.

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As Agha (2000, 2004), Irvine (2001), and Silverstein (1998) have noted, there is not a clear-cut distinction between situational variation (defined typically as variation according to context) and dialectal variation (variation according to speaker). The full repertoire of a given community is always unequally distributed across speakers, so that no individual speaker has access to all the registers of the larger speech community. Within this framework, what is to be considered dialectal versus superposed variation (Gumperz 1968/1972) is therefore not fixed, but contextually defined (Silverstein 1998). Through use of different ways of speaking from across the larger community’s repertoire, speakers may index situation and/or their social identities. That is, when speakers use a form from one register rather than another, it is the socially indexical rather than the referential “meaning” that is at issue. As a social index, an utterance in a particular register may make relevant to participants different dimensions of social context, such as the nature of the speech event itself, a speaker’s affective stance, a speaker’s current interlocutory social identity, or the social identity of the persona voiced (for example, did the speaker swear because she was among friends, out of anger, because of the “type” of person she is, or because she was quoting someone else who swore?). It must be determined which of these dimensions is salient to participants in a particular context. I therefore am defining register in this broad sense to describe the different ways of speaking in a community whose use may index these multiple dimensions of social context. In both France and Portugal, there is a long scholarly and vernacular tradition of talking about register variation in terms of “language levels.” These levels have been described in the scholarly literature on French, on a continuum from the literary, to the formal, the current, and the familiar. For French specifically, several authors have talked about dédoublement du vocabulaire (doubling of vocabulary) (Armstrong 2001; Gadet 1989, 1992, 1996; Lodge 1993) or vocabulaire parallèle, (Sauvageot 1964) where there is a profusion of “ways of saying the same thing” that may mark the speaker’s identity and/or social context in which they are used. A similar phenomenon exists in Portuguese.15 These different lexical expressions vary most in their socially indexical value, rather than their referential value. Indeed, participants in my study themselves talked about language variation in terms of language levels.16 Specifically, participants regularly used four terms for characterizing language levels in both French and Portuguese: soutenu (formal), courant (everyday, unmarked usage), familier (familiar), and vulgaire/relâché (vulgar). As these four descriptors seemed to best capture participants’ understanding of language variation, these were the terms that I used to code register. Table 5.2 provides examples of lexical items in the four registers in both languages.

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Table 5.2 Register alternates of saying “a man” Register Formal Everyday/ Unmarked Familiar 17 Vulgar

English the gentleman the man

French le monsieur l’homme

Portuguese o senhor o homem

the guy the dude

le type le mec

o tipo o gajo

The different kinds of registers speakers may use and recognize are certainly more complex than this four-level system implies. Speakers often think of registers as more fixed than they necessarily are (Armstrong 2001; Gadet 1989, 1992, 1996; Lodge 1993). As these authors as well as others (Agha 2004; Joos 1962; Myers-Scotton 1998a) have argued, registers are perhaps better understood as gradient rather than categorical phenomena. Similarly, there are also different kinds of “familiar” registers, for example, the familiar registers associated with baby talk as opposed to adolescent peer-group talk. However, although I have adopted a somewhat simplified way of describing French and Portuguese register variation, these four distinctions do tap into locally recognized ways of describing different language levels in both languages. I thus coded for these four language levels, as well as a fifth, referred to as “other language,” to capture when speakers code-switch to the other language within the interlocutory role. Although using these indigenously recognized distinctions ultimately facilitates systematic coding and comparison between French and Portuguese, comparing registers across languages is no straightforward matter. Even if a French and Portuguese coder were to categorize a speaker’s French usage of le mec, and Portuguese usage of o gajo (roughly, “the guy”) as both colloquial usage, the social image indexed by each may still differ. As described in chapter 3, Luso-descendants’ colloquial usage typically evokes an image of rurality and regional belonging in Portuguese, and tough, urban/suburban youth in French. This nonequivalence of their social locations in French and Portuguese contexts was something noted from elicitations of listeners’ judgments of the social images and personas these bilinguals’ speech summons up, as well as ethnographically in French and Portuguese contexts (see chapters 7–9). Such differences are indeed perhaps best captured qualitatively. However, although the actual personas that speakers evoke in their two languages may best be described ethnographically, the global proportions with which speakers use different interlocutory registers can usefully be described quantitatively. Therefore, although not a substitute for careful, qualitative analysis of the range and combinations of registers speakers deploy, coding interlocutory speech following these register distinctions more easily allows comparisons of not entirely equivalent speech registers across languages.

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On what basis do coders make these determinations of register? It is of course impossible to give an exhaustive list of formal features that would assign a particular stretch of discourse to a particular register, as people exploit and respond to multiple formal levels of lexicon, phonology, morphology, or syntax to recognize registers. Furthermore, coders do not recognize and differentiate registers based on formal cues alone, but also based on how those formal cues are used in specific contexts. Register coding therefore requires either ethnographic knowledge (as was the case for me, the primary coder) and/or insider’s intuitive knowledge of the socially indexical meaning of particular forms used in context. Thus coders’ judgments of register rely on their knowledge of speaking norms, as well as their ability to recognize departures from expectably co-occurring ways of talking (Ervin-Tripp 1972/1995). Despite the challenges in providing formal criteria for coding register, inter-rater agreement for this category was relatively high (see reliability section below). A comparison of speakers’ interlocutory register repertoires in French and Portuguese together will give insight into French versus Portuguese range of personas that speakers are unambiguously willing to inhabit as “their own,” when speaking to the interviewer in the here-and-now. 2. Character Perspective and Register This section explores how speakers present themselves and others within the character role—as personas distinct from those presented in the interlocutory here-and-now. a. Character perspective Before coding the register of character speech, I first coded the perspective of each quotation—first-person (the speaker quotes herself) or third-person (the speaker quotes someone else). This allows one to identify which perspectives dominate in character performance, (for example, whether speakers quote themselves more than they quote others in the two languages). I then also coded to whom the quoted utterance was directed—specifically, is a first-person character talking to herself/thinking aloud (self-to-self, C1C1) or to another (self-to-other, C1-C3)? Is a third-person character shown speaking to himself/thinking aloud (other to same other), to a first-person character (other-to-self), or to yet another character (other to other)? This reveals whether speakers use quotation more to display particular characters’ thoughts,18 or to display characters in interactions with each other. b. Character role register To capture the manner in which characters were presented, I also coded each clause of direct quotation into one of five registers in which the quoted character was made to speak (unmarked, familiar, high, vulgar, other language). A stretch of character speech was coded as familiar, high, vulgar, or other language, if quoted characters were made to use a

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speech register that gradiently challenges or departs from local sociolinguistic norms and expectations of co-occurrence and alternation (Ervin-Tripp 1972/1995), for the kind of speech event represented.19 (1). Unmarked for the type of speech event reported; (2). More familiar than conventional for the reported speech situation; (3). More formal than conventional for the reported speech situation, (4). More vulgar than conventional for the reported speech situation; or (5). Other language (French if surrounding speech is in Portuguese, Portuguese if surrounding speech is in French). For example, one speaker quoted her complaint to an unhelpful bureaucrat, who was unwilling to give any information. The speaker first quotes herself in an unmarked manner as politely requesting information. Excerpt 5.10 Unmarked character speech French “S’il vous plaît, euh, je voudrais savoir, je voudrais avoir des renseignements au sujet des des euh des prix, de ce que vous proposez en tant que traiteur.”

English translation “Please/excuse me, um, I’d like to know, I’d like to have some information about the prices, what you offer as a catering service.”

Later on in this same story, when she tells the clerk that she should be able to get information even if her colleague is absent, she uses a far more familiar register. Familiar character speech has been underlined. Excerpt 5.11 Familiar character speech: French “Alors, pendant six mois, les gus, ils vont se pointer, vous allez leur rienrien leur dire?”

English translation “So, for six months the guys, they’re gonna show up, you’re not gonna tell them anything-anything?”

In this way, no form is familiar, formal, or vulgar in and of itself, but is judged as such depending on the character in whose mouth and in which situation it is used. Coding the register of speech of quoted characters allows one to systematically identify how such characters are depicted, relative to each other, and relative to speech in the interlocutory guise. By identifying the speech registers participants adopt within and across the different speaker roles, one can specify the local cultural universes and associated types of people that speakers evoke/invoke in each language. What are the registers that they adopt as their “own” when speaking directly to the interviewer? Do they regularly contrast the registers that they use in the hereand-now with the ways of speaking that they attribute to different quoted char-

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acters, (for example using obscenities when speaking as particular types of characters, which they do not otherwise use)? Do they portray the speech of characters other than themselves as speaking in ways that contrast with how they quote themselves? By relating speaker role and speech register in this way, one obtains a more complete picture of the personas, stances, and social universes speakers conjure up in French and Portuguese. Systematic Coding All stories from the corpora of the twenty-three speakers were coded for speaker role and register, using the above framework. Each story was first parsed into clauses. A clause was defined as any segment with a conjugated verb or infinitive. Discourse markers and interjections that do not show logical connections were also counted like a clause. Each clause was then assigned to one or more of the speaker role categories. The speech register of each clause, both in character mode and in interlocutory roles was then also coded as falling into one or more categories: unmarked, familiar, high, vulgar, other language. To make stories of different lengths comparable, quantitative results for speaker role inhabitances are reported as percentages of total clauses (e.g., the percentage of all clauses rendered in narrator role). Intercoder agreement was established by having two coders independently code 20% of the entire corpus. Reliability was computed separately for both French and Portuguese. In French, coders agreed about clause boundaries 92.9% (n = 4950) of the time, and in Portuguese 93% (n = 3948) of the time. I used Cohen’s Kappa (1960) as my formula for computing intercoder agreement for speaker role inhabitance and register coding. Cohen’s Kappa allows one to correct for rates of agreement due purely to chance, and is considered superior to percent agreement. Kappa was .83 in Portuguese (n = 3441) and .89 (n = 4680) in French for speaker role inhabitance. Cohen’s Kappa for register was .76 (n = 3750) for Portuguese and .75 (n = 2870) for French. Fleiss (1981) describes Kappa over .75 as excellent. This level of agreement allows one to state with some confidence that the coding categories were sufficiently clear and recognizable that others besides the author were able to replicate the findings and identify the same trends. As explained above, percentages exceed 100%, as speakers may inhabit more than one role and use more than one register at a time. As the study involved a within-subject design, I used two-tailed paired t-tests as my tests of statistical significance, in order to compare the same speakers in two conditions (French vs. Portuguese). In other words, to determine whether speakers consistently use a particular discourse strategy more in one language than the other (such as percentage of interlocutor role speech), I will be examining consistent within-subject differences between the two conditions (French vs. Por-

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tuguese), across all twenty-three speakers, relative to conventionally accepted levels of statistical significance. Summary of Analytic Framework and Goals This framework provides a systematic, linguistically informed framework for comparing the voicing in the same speakers’ French and Portuguese narrations of the same experiences. By analyzing speakers’ patterns of voicing in French and Portuguese narratives, I will determine empirically whether people consistently display persona and affect differently in their two languages. This analysis of voicing involves examining how speakers laminate speech events and speaker roles, and how they distribute socially identified ways of speaking across those events and roles. This essentially addresses the question, “In what capacity/for whom is the person speaking, and what socioculturally typical way of speaking is being used?” within and across French and Portuguese utterances, stories, and corpora of stories. Together, these comparative analyses will show whether people have distinctive patterns of voicing that they adopt in each language. One can then specify the empirically identifiable discourse patterns that may contribute to their particular experiences of self in their two languages. Although this framework was developed for the study of bilingual identity enactment in narrative, it contributes new, linguistically informed tools that specify the indexical strategies through which speakers accomplish different types of voicing (Bakhtin 1981) or footing (Goffman 1979/1981) in narrative more generally. By analyzing the more pragmatic, socially indexical meanings of narrative, beyond actual propositional content, this framework allows one to specify how oral narrative is multifunctional and multivoiced in systematically precise ways. The method and analytic framework presented in this chapter enable one to operationalize notions of footing and voicing so that these concepts can be applied to analyze large corpora of narrative material quantitatively and qualitatively. With this framework in mind, in chapter 6 I present the results that emerged from application of this perspective to bilinguals’ narratives of personal experience told in their two languages. 1

See, however, Wortham and Locher 1996. See Koven 2002 for a full review of these traditions. 3 Whether the country in which the study was conducted affects the way in which speakers use each language in the interview setting is an intriguing, empirical question. This study could very well be replicated with a similar group of speakers during their annual trip to Portugal, or with Luso-descendants who have moved permanently to Portugal. At this point I have collected ethnographic, but not experimental, material with many of these same speakers, while they were vacationing in Portugal, or since they have relocated to Portugal. In ongoing work, I am exploring shifts in the nature and meanings of speakers' performance of French and Portuguese identities in these two national contexts. 4 See transcription conventions in front matter. 2

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5

How the stories recorded for this study differ from naturally occurring conversational narratives is a topic I am currently exploring in ongoing work. I also have a corpus of naturally occurring peer-group conversations in which most of these same speakers took part. Interestingly, I often heard speakers retell the same stories that they told in the interview context during spontaneous conversations with their peers. This reassuringly demonstrates that, at least in terms of content, the stories speakers told during the interview context were not necessarily different from those told in peer groups. One would expect that some aspects of the form of the “same” story told both spontaneously in naturally occurring conversation and in the above described interview context will undoubtedly differ. Such differences might include, at the very least, how coparticipants manage turns and how the story is triggered by and integrated into these two different interactional contexts. However, how such tellings differ is an empirical question. In future work I will be comparing how the “same” story was not just retold in two different languages in the interview, but also how the “same” story got retold spontaneously, comparing multiple tellings in ways similar to those described here. One can also productively refer to Ochs and Capps’s (2001: 20-21) dimensions of narratives to characterize those collected here. On the dimension of tellership, the stories tend to involve one teller, rather than much co-telling. On the dimension of embeddedness, they may be somewhat more detached from the ongoing interaction than those told in spontaneous conversation. However, we will see that the interviewer and the surrounding interaction play key roles in these narratives. 6 To put the speaker at ease, at the beginning of the storytelling session, speakers were also asked to tell about an experience they had had with a pet—their own, or someone else's. In both France and Portugal, most people have either had a pet or have known others with pets. Pet stories typically engage the speaker in her narrative without requiring her to reveal anything very personal. These first stories thus functioned as ice-breakers or warm-ups to the rest of the interview. As most of these pet stories were told in the third-person, they differ from the other first-person narratives elicited. For this reason, pet stories have not been included in the subsequent analysis. 7 This was done in order to be able to render individual interviewers' styles comparable enough, so that one can make comparisons across interviewers. It is true that this design limits the extent to which interviewers could play an active role in the co-narration of stories. That said, it makes systematic comparison within and across participants and interviewers far more feasible. 8 Participants typically found this encounter to be quite meaningful. One of the interviewers confirmed that the participants she interviewed often seemed to establish a very intimate atmosphere with her and the other interviewers. Although participants were told that they should feel free to talk about or refrain from talking about any story they chose, many participants shared very personal material, about painful family or romantic conflicts. Several participants subsequently commented on how “therapeutic” it felt to share these stories. Perhaps as Wortham (2001) found in his analysis of Jane’s life history interview, participants may be able to turn the speech event of the “interview” to their own purposes. Most participants in the current study seemed to treat the interview as an opportunity to share experiences with a likeminded peer, and some even seemed to treat it like a psychotherapeutic encounter. 9 There is a small literature on the changes the "same" story undergoes when told in different contexts. The most famous is that of Richard Bauman's discussion (1986) of Ed Bell. The interactional text of Ed Bell's repeated narrations of the same event to different audiences does shift, although many elements remain stable, in particular the presence of quoted speech. See also Moore (1993), Norrick (1998), Polanyi (1981), and Chafe (1998). 10 See Benveniste 1971 for a discussion of the passé composé as the tense of autobiography. 11 It also corresponds roughly to the 'evaluator' in Hill's (1995a) framework.

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12

There exists an extensive literature on the interpersonal and affective effects of such style shifting and/or code-switching, a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of the current discussion. For classic discussions, see Bell (1984), Blom and Gumperz (1972), Friedrich (1972), Labov (1972a), and Myers-Scotton (2001). For more recent discussions see Eckert and Rickford (2001.) 13 There is an extensive literature on reported speech in oral French narrative (See Bres 1996; Bres and Verine 2002; Ducrot 1980, 1984; Gaulmyn 1996; Hassler 2002; Morel 1996; Rosier 1999; Vincent and Dubois 1997). There is a somewhat smaller literature on Portuguese reported speech. See Morello (1998) and Dionísio (1994) for examples from Brazilian Portuguese. 14 Note the following example of interlocutory-character speech. Character-narrator speech is italicized (for narrator role) and underlined (for character role), whereas interlocutorycharacter speech is bolded (for interlocutor role) and underlined (for character role). Excerpt 5.12 Interlocutory-Character speech French L'ami de ma cousine, qui est donc français, aime beaucoup plaisanter sur tout et n'importe quoi (..) 'fin, il me taquine, et moi, je le prends pas comme des taquineries, je le prends comme une agression, c'est, c'est ne voir en moi que le cô-, comme si moi je ne voyais que le Portugal a alors que ce n'est pas du tout, moi je ne le vois pas comme ça. b

English translation My cousin's boyfriend, who is French, likes joking a lot about everything and nothing (..) so, he teases me, and I don't take it as teasing, I take it as an attack, it's it's only seeing in me the si-,

as if I only saw Portugal. a whereas it's not at all, I don't see it like that. b

In this example, the segment italicized as 'a' (comme si moi je ne voyais que le Portugal/as if I only saw Portugal) is coded as a clause of narrator-character speech, framed by comme si (as if), where the speaker takes the perspective of her cousin's boyfriend to show us his thoughts about her. The segment underlined as 'b' (alors que ce n'est pas du tout, moi je ne le vois pas comme ça/whereas it's not at all, I don't see it like that.) is coded as both interlocutory role and character role speech. While it is clear that she is addressing her current listener, we can also simultaneously imagine her replying to her cousin's boyfriend with those very words. As in this example, such blendings of the interlocutory and character perspectives often occur without a framing verb of thinking, feeling, or speaking. 15 There is a significantly smaller sociolinguistic literature on register in European Portuguese. See Castro (1985), Cabello (1987), and Kiesler (1989). In this analysis, I adopt these register categories for both languages, as they were the ones that participants themselves evoked. 16 See how elaborately participants discuss language levels in chapter 7. 17 I intend no value judgment. Vulgar is the term that participants used most often to describe this lexical register. 18 See Drescher (2004), Golato (2002), Maynard (1996), and Rabatel (2001) for discussions of the forms and functions of quoted thoughts in French, German, and Japanese.

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19

Speakers may shift the register in which they have the same character speak—starting in a neutral, unmarked register and then becoming noticeably more formal or informal over the course of the interaction.

CHAPTER 6 ENACTING BILINGUAL SELVES IN NARRATIVE: RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING

Using the framework presented in chapter 5 to comparatively code French and Portuguese corpora, this chapter reports results of the analyses which reveal differences in the formal devices through which speakers enact personas in French and Portuguese. As discussed in chapter 5, this chapter answers whether and how speakers’ “voice” (Bakhtin 1981) different selves and others in French and Portuguese. Specifically, shown is whether people privilege particular speaker role perspectives of current and past selves and others more when speaking in French or Portuguese. I conclude with a discussion of how the consistent differences found within subjects, across languages are implicated in participants’ experience of difference in their two languages. I will ultimately speculate about the reasons for consistent differences the same participants show between their two languages. Research Questions Briefly restated here are the research questions, with the framework for analyzing voicing in French versus Portuguese presented in chapter 5 in mind. As explained in chapter 5, this framework allows one to code the multiple speaker role perspectives within narrative discourse in a systematic fashion. To show the complex connections among and within speaker roles in French versus Portuguese, and to maintain clarity, I have organized my presentation of the research questions and their results in outline form. RQ stands for research question. RQI. Relative Extensiveness of Speaker Role Performance Do speakers consistently occupy the three roles of narrator, interlocutor, and/or character to different extents in the two languages? As discussed, relative to narrator speech, greater amounts of interlocutory and character speech might indicate greater affective display in one language than the other. RQII. Role of the Original Language of the Narrated Event What is the role of the language of the original narrated event on the extensiveness of character performance? Do speakers present more character role

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speech when narrating in the language in which the events occurred? As discussed, we will see the role of the language of the narrated event, relative to that of the narrating event, as one possible factor in the extensiveness of character performance. RQIII. Within-Role Repertoires Whether and how speakers perform speaker roles not just to different extents, but whether they perform them qualitatively differently in each language will be determined. As a formal application of Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of voicing, it will also be determined how quoted (character) versus nonquoted (interlocutory) personas speak. Comparison of speakers’ character versus interlocutory speech reveals how different types of “selves” are presented in and out of quotation marks. I will ask what these trends reveal more generally about how these speakers present themselves. More specifically, I will ask the following questions about strategies used within and across the speaker roles. A. Interlocutory Role RQIIIA1. Interlocutory Register Usage: French versus Portuguese When people speak through their “own” current voice, as interlocutors, directly to the interviewer, do they use different proportions of marked register speech (familiar, vulgar, other language, formal)? This question addresses the speech of the here-and-now self in French and Portuguese. RQIIIA2. Other Interlocutory Strategies Within the interlocutory roles, in addition to register, what are the different sets of discursive strategies people use to display affect and identity in each language? B. Character Role RQIIIB1. Character Perspectives When speakers present quoted characters, what types of quoted interactions are shown? Whom do they quote (e.g., themselves vs. others) and how much? For example, do speakers use quotation to quote themselves thinking aloud? If so, do they present their own and other characters’ thoughts more in one language than the other? RQIIIB2. Character Role Register: Contrasting Quoted Selves versus Quoted Others French versus Portuguese What are the registers in which there-andthen quoted characters (of self and others) are made to speak, in French versus Portuguese? More specifically, what is the relationship between how quoted others versus quoted selves are represented? More specifically we will determine:

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RQIIIB2a. Registers of quoted selves What registers are used when speakers quote themselves as characters? RQIIIB2b. Registers of quoted others What registers are used when speakers quote others as characters? RQIIIB2c. Comparison of quoted selves versus quoted others Is more marked speech put in the mouths of others or to quote oneself ? This will reveal distinctions between speakers’ appropriation of a register as their own, versus use of a particular register to illustrate others’ personas, but kept at a remove from one’s own usage. Together these questions address how speakers enact or “voice” identities across narrating and narrated events in French versus Portuguese: how they contrast presentations of themselves now versus then, and presentations of self versus others. By applying the framework presented in chapter 5 to a large corpus of materials, I will compare the same speakers’ discursive presentations of self and other in narratives in two languages. Results RQI Comparative Speaker Role Analysis RQIA. Narrator Role Speech Speakers engage in significantly more narrator role speech in Portuguese than in French (see table 6.1). This means that they engage in more expository past-tense narration with a mean of 48.6% in Portuguese of clauses of a narrative and 40.4% in this role in French. RQIB. Interlocutor Role Speech As narration of plot is only one role-related activity in narrative, I also ask whether speakers mark their current involvement as interpersonally and affectively engaged interlocutors more in one language than the other. While all speakers show high amounts of interlocutor role speech in both languages, they are significantly more interlocutory in French. (See table 6.1). Expressed as a proportion of all clauses uttered, 59.2% of all Portuguese clauses show interlocutory involvement, whereas 67.5% of all French clauses show interlocutory involvement. These results of both narrator and interlocutor roles together suggest that speakers engage in more neutral, “objective” narration in Portuguese, and more current affective display/interpersonal engagement in French. These trends are visible in the table below and in excerpt (5.8) shown in chapter 5, where the content or plot of two versions is quite similar, while the greater amount of interlocutor speech in French is strikingly different—a combination of discourse markers (quoi, bon, ’fin), intensifiers (quoi que ce soit, aucune,

118 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

bien, assez), and the complete stepping out of the narrating frame to make a parenthetical comment at the end of the excerpt. In the French, the speaker used more elements that conventionally index interpersonal, affective, or attitudinal meaning, rather than referential meaning. In contrast, the Portuguese version contains almost straight narrator speech, the only interlocutory break being basically one discourse marker (mas prontos) and the use of condições, a shift to a more formal register. One sees another illustration of this trend in the following example, also shown in Koven (2004b). More of the narrative excerpt is presented as neutral past-tense narration in Portuguese, and there is a much higher proportion of the here-and-now interlocutory role in French. Interlocutory speech has been boldfaced. Excerpt 6.1 showing differing amounts of interlocutory involvement in French versus Portuguese: Portuguese e eu, peguei na prenda que eu le tinha oferecido e botei-a pro chão . English translation of Portuguese and I, I took the gift that I’d given her and I put it on the ground.

French puis je lui ai balancé le cadeau, quoi, j’l’ai balancé par terre. English translation of French then I flung the gift at her, you know, I flung it on the ground.

Note in French the shifts to a lower register, and the discourse marker quoi. Note also the repetition. These consistently different amounts (proportions) of interlocutory speech might indeed be the discursive underpinnings that underlie speakers’ own reported sense that they are more engaged in French than in Portuguese. RQIC. Character Role Speech Turning to the third speaker-role perspective, one can ask how extensively speakers animate the voices of characters in each language. Similar to results reported in Koven (2001) from a smaller sample, there is no significant difference in how much speakers reinhabit the character role in either language (see table 6.1). In other words, the language of telling, French or Portuguese, does not in itself make speakers more likely to make characters speak. Below, I consider not only if the language, French or Portuguese, plays a role in the extensiveness of character performance, but whether the language in which an event originally occurred impacts the extensiveness of quotation.

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Table 6.1 Mean proportions of clauses rendered in each of three speaker roles, across participants (paired t-tests). French Portuguese t p= 40.4 48.6 -5.59 .000 (SD = 8.2) (SD = 10.1) Interlocutor 67.5 59.2 6.79 .000 (SD = 10.1) (SD = 10.5) Character 17.8 19.1 -1.4 .170 (SD = 8.6) (SD = 8.8) Note: df = 22 for narrator, interlocutor, and character. As role coding is not mutually exclusive (roles can co-occur); the numbers exceed 100%.1 Narrator

These results reveal that although speakers engage in more here-and-now interlocutory engagement in French and more neutral narration in Portuguese, they do not perform different amounts of character speech. Although speakers may indeed seem more engaged in French, because they perform characters to similar extents, they may also seem quite animated in both languages. RQID Impact of Language of Original Experience on Extensiveness of Quoted Character Speech in Retelling In the previous analyses I considered the role of the language, French or Portuguese, on the extensiveness of speaker role performance. I had not yet considered the relationship between the original language used in the narrated event, and the importance of that language in subsequent narrations of the narrated event. Following Koven (2001), one might also ask the effect of telling stories in the language in which those events originally occurred. Do people, for instance, tell stories with more quotation when narrating in the same language in which an event occurred, seeking to “faithfully” evoke personas from the narrated event? This matter has been raised by a handful of experimental and clinical authors to determine how bilinguals remember lived events differently in their two languages (Javier, Barroso, and Munoz 1993; Marian and Kaushanskaya 2004; Otoya 1987; Schrauf and Durazo-Arvizu 2006, Schrauf, Pavlenko, and Dewaele 2003; Schrauf 2000; Schrauf and Rubin 1998). Specifically, how do bilinguals remember events in the language of the here-and-now, when those events may have originally taken place in that same language versus in their other language? (See Schrauf 2000, Schrauf and Durazo-Arvizu 2006; Schrauf, Pavlenko, and Dewaele 2003 for a review of this literature.) For example, Schrauf (2000) reviewed clinical and experimental studies in order to explore whether speakers have privileged access to past life events when (re)capturing those events in the same language in which they occurred. Schrauf argued that bilinguals consistently recall more events, when recalling those events in the language in which they originally occurred. That is, when

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the “encoding” language and “retrieving” message match, memories will be richer. Unfortunately, as the authors do not analyze the discourse bilinguals produce when they narrate memories in their two languages, with the exception of Javier, Barroso, and Munoz (1993),2 they do not typically interpret the process of “recollecting” in the experimental situation as a narrative task. Despite the fact that Schrauf, Pavlenko, and Dewaele (2003) claimed that such memories are indeed structured like narratives, narratives of autobiographical memories are not analyzed in their own right. Although the authors appealed to a “contextual” understanding of the role of a language to trigger more memories in that same language, without having actually examined the discourse itself, these authors are inconsistent in the extent to which they draw from a pragmatic understanding of narrative language. Here, I take the process of recollecting experiences to be a narrative, rather than a cognitive task. That is, I compare relationships not between the language of encoding and the language of retrieval, but between the languages of the narrated and the narrating events. This question thus addresses the issue of language(s) and personal memories by examining the discursive features of “reliving” past events, focusing specifically on features of the discourse itself that reveal how events are told in each language. This question is methodologically challenging to address. Scholars rarely have access to recordings of the “original” utterances from which speakers quote. Thus, determining a clear-cut single language in which an event originally occurred is no simple matter. Similarly, as many others have noted, speakers’ self-reports of language use are notoriously unreliable. When these bilinguals interact with other bilinguals, it is quite possible that both languages are spoken. However, as described earlier, in addition to their interactions with other bilinguals, these speakers are regularly forced to function in monolingual contexts in both France and Portugal by necessity. Therefore, in reports of monolingual contexts, one may be able to hypothesize with some confidence the language in which bilingual speakers in the original event must have spoken. For example, although an argument with one’s émigré mother could have occurred with code-switching and mixing, a dispute with a functionary in Portugal could be expected to have occurred exclusively in Portuguese. Similarly, an encounter in the Paris metro could be assumed to have occurred in French. In order to determine whether telling the story in the language in which it originally happened affects how it is narrated when told in that language, I therefore selected for each speaker a subset of those stories in which I could be relatively sure, from speaker report, and ethnographically derived knowledge, which language was originally used. Across the twenty-three speakers who told stories once in each language, the majority of the stories told took place in monolingual settings. I therefore had to eliminate only a small number of stories whose original language(s) was/were indeterminate,

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reducing the analyzable corpus size only slightly. One can then compare how speakers quote others in the same language those speakers originally spoke with how speakers quote those same others in other languages different from the “original” language, as is done in table 6.2. This allows us to determine whether and how quotations have been transformed in repeated narrations of that event, within and across languages. Table 6.2 Mean percentage of clauses of character speech in stories told in original language versus other language (paired t-test.)

% of all clauses rendered in Character speech

Told in original language 18.1% (SD = 9.1)

Told in other language 18.8% (SD = 9.8)

t

p =

-9.80

.338 (not statistically significant)

Note: df = 22

As can be seen in table 6.2, speakers do not inhabit the character role significantly more when they narrate in the language of the original experience as opposed to the other language. Thus, contra the research cited above, one cannot conclude that telling a story in the language in which it may have originally happened necessarily compels speakers to narrate more “vividly.” Speakers’ capacity to quote as extensively in French or Portuguese, and in the original versus the other language is illustrated in the following examples. In this excerpted story, this speaker tells about having been reproached by an elderly woman in a crowded Parisian metro for having accidentally pushed her. The speaker is equally able to quote her reply to the woman in both languages—regardless of the fact that this event must originally have occurred in French. Character speech has been underlined. Excerpt 6.2 Excerpts from two versions of same story with different amounts of character speech. Portuguese A: uma vez foi assim com uma pessoa, não sei como é que foi, bah, a gente do, dei-lhe em cima um encontrao, e ela foi logo, “você não ‘tá a ver, não sei o quê, eu sou mais idosa do que você, você nem liga, nem nada,”

French A: ouais, j’ai bousculé unI: tu as bousculé une dame? A: mh, et puis bon elle, m’a, elle m’a engueulée, quoi, elle n’a pas arrêté, p’ce que j’étais mal élevée, pa’ce que

eu, “olhe, desculpe, foi sem querer, que isto, aqui ‘tá tanta gente,”

mais je me suis excusée, j’ai fait, “excusez-moi, j’ai pas fait

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“pois, você é mal educada, não sei quê,” ficou logo ali a berrar.

exprès, il y avait beaucoup de monde.” et puis bon elle m’a, elle m’a engueulée, quoi. elle a dit tout ce qu’elle avait à dire, en fait, que (.) j’étais mal élevée, que je pou-, (.) que ça se faisait pas, qu’elle était d’un certain âge, et que je devais faire attention, et patati et patata.

English Translation of Portuguese A: one time it was with a person, I don’t know how it was, bah, the people -, I bumped into her. and she went right away, “you don’t see, blabla, I’m older than you, you’re not even paying attention, not even anything,”

English Translation of French A: yeah, I pushed a I: you pushed a woman/lady? A: mh and then okay she, she yelled at me (fam.), like, she didn’t let up, because, (.) I had no manners, because

me, “look, excuse me, it wasn’t on purpose, there are so many people here,”

but I apologized, I was like, “excuse me, didn’t do it on purpose, there were a lot of people,” and then well she, she yelled at me (fam.), y’know, she said everything she had to say, in fact, that (.) I had no manners, that i cou- (.) that that wasn’t done, that she was of a certain age, and that I should pay attention, and blablabla.

“yeah, you have no manners, blabla,” She started yelling there right away.

Although this event must originally have occurred in French, this speaker is equally able to quote her reply to the woman in both languages. Note how the speaker actually quotes the woman in direct discourse more in Portuguese than in French. In French, the language in which this event must have transpired, all the quoted woman’s words are rendered in indirect discourse. This speaker is perfectly able to replay herself and the elderly woman as quoted characters in both languages. Across speakers and stories, as well as in this example, there is thus no simple relationship between the language in which an event happened and how that event is later retold. Therefore, whether someone tells an event in the language in which the event originally occurred does not appear to matter in how extensively the event is replayed in either language. Note also the following example of this, where the speaker has told a story about having been sexually mistreated in Portugal and how she stood up to her abuser. Indirect discourse has been put in italics and underlined, and direct discourse has been underlined.

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Excerpt 6.3 from two tellings of story showing creative use of direct discourse in the language in which the event did not originally occur: Portuguese A: nunca mais dei-lhe confiança a esse a esse homem. I: desde aí, ele nunca mais te tocou? A: nunca mais me tocou. porque ele sabia perfeitamente que eu não era da- das raparigas que se podiam deixar tocar assim I: mh A: logo pus os, pus as coisas ao certo. English translation of Portuguese A: never again did I trust that that man. I: from then on, he never touched you again? A: he never touched me again. because he knew perfectly [well] that I wasn’t one of the, of those girls who would let themselves be touched like that. I: mh A: right away I put the, I made things clear.

French A: je me suis dit que, bon, tu vois, ça, ça allait pas, quoi, c’était pas normal, jusqu’au jour où j’avais mis les points sur les “I” en lui disant, “maintenant, t’arrêtes, chuis pas, chuis pas n’importe qui et euh je me laisserai pas faire, chuis pas euh la salope du coin, quoi.”

English translation of French A: I said to myself, okay, you see, that, that it wasn’t okay, like, it wasn’t normal, until the day when I dotted the “I”’s ((made things clear)), saying to him, “now, you cut it out, I’m not, I’m not just anybody and I uh won’t let myself be taken advantage of, I’m not uh the slut of the neighborhood, okay.”

As this woman had earlier described her abuser as having always lived in Portugal, we can safely assume that this event originally occurred in Portuguese. In the Portuguese version, the “original” language of the experience, no characters speak in direct discourse. The character speech comes in the form of what her abuser knows—thoughts she attributes to him. These thoughts are rendered in indirect discourse. In representing her own response to him, she uses no character speech at all, but rather just the metapragmatic expression “pus as coisas ao certo” (I made things clear). It is up to us to imagine how she accomplished this. However, it is in the French version that she uses more direct discourse, a language this character does not speak, and that the speaker would not believably use with him. She has herself stand up to him in direct discourse, with a vividly replayed demonstration of how she did this. Her indirect discourse presents for us what she wants us to believe that her character thought at the time. So for this brief swatch of discourse, none of the Portuguese is presented in direct discourse, whereas five of the seven clauses of character speech in French are rendered in direct discourse. There is not, therefore, a simple rela-

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tionship between amount of quotation and whether the language used matches the language of the original utterance. In other words, this would suggest that quotation is not, per se, about accurate memory, where quotation would serve to replay the actual words spoken in the manner in which they were spoken. Speakers are just as likely to quote a character vividly in the other language, as creative “constructed dialogue” (Tannen 1989). This supports material discussed by Hill and Hill (1986) and Álvarez-Cáccamo (1996). Summary of RQI: Role Inhabitance It is noteworthy that in both languages speakers are engaged in more than past-tense narration. If we take narrative activity to involve more than the sequential representation of past events, and look at the multiple roles speakers must perform to narrate their past experiences, we see that indeed in both languages, speakers shift back and forth a great deal between and blend speaker roles. This supports Bakhtin’s (1981) point as well as work by Wortham (2001) and Koven (2002) that narratives accomplish far more than plot presentation. In addition to straight narration, speakers simultaneously present, comment upon, and position themselves and others, both relative to the story and to the interaction in which the story is told. As was shown, however, there are differences in how people do this in each language. Speakers use different “voices” to tell the same events, privileging one manner of talking about themselves or perspective on themselves over another. The narrator role perspective dominates more in Portuguese tellings. In French, speakers tell more of a story in the interlocutor role. There is no statistically significant difference in the amount of character mode. Together these trends demonstrate that speakers use consistently different strategies of self-narration in each language. RQII Language-Specific Within-Role Repertoires Having addressed whether speakers inhabit each of these three roles to different extents, that is, of greater or lesser percentage. In the next section, I will show not only how much speakers inhabit these roles, but in what ways people perform the interlocutory and character roles in each language. In particular, I will determine whether speakers use different kinds of discursive strategies to enact identities and display affect in each language, when inhabiting interlocutory (here-and-now) and character (there-and-then) roles. RQIIA Interlocutor Role Repertoires: Performance of Current Personas As discussed in terms of speaker role inhabitance, it was shown that these bilinguals, like all speakers, assume multiple voices that are and are not their “own” in the current interaction.3 In other words, in addition to who they may present themselves as being in the here-and-now as interlocutors, they also in-

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carnate character versions of themselves and others from other times and places. Within these different role capacities, one can ask not just how much, but how they make their different guises of selves and others speak. As noted by numerous scholars in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, speakers may use the multiple ways of talking within a community as semiotic resources not only to enact their current identities, but also to playfully or critically comment upon other culturally available identities, with which they may at moments identify or from which they may distance themselves. As such, speakers may avail themselves of sociolinguistic variation, without putting or only partially putting it in their “own” mouths (Rampton 1995; Coupland 2001). Inspired by Bakhtin (1981), we will therefore investigate how speakers distribute different socially saturated languages and registers across the different speaker roles. More specifically I will see which registers and languages are used in which speaker roles, attributed to the different “I’s” of selves and others in nonquoted/interlocutory as opposed to quoted/character discourse. As Urban (1989) argues, speakers’ use of multiple kinds of “I”’s—from the everyday referentially indexical “I” to different kinds and degrees of performance and identification with other kinds of cultural “I”s, in and outside of quotation marks, sheds light on cultural constructions of selfhood. In this way, attention to the relationships between speakers’ quoted and nonquoted speaking roles yields insight into their strategies of verbal identity construction. How speakers present their French and Portuguese interlocutory personas in relation to French and Portuguese quoted characters is examined below. How speakers show contrasts between the speech of different kinds of quoted characters is also explored. As mentioned earlier, to do this, I separately coded speech register from the interlocutor and speech from the mouths of quoted characters. As described above, narratives in both languages were coded for language and register, as unmarked, familiar, formal, vulgar, or other language speech, both when uttered in the speaker’s “own” current voice (interlocutor), and when put in the mouths of quoted characters of self (C1) and other (C3). This will tell us about the images of self and others speakers present in their two languages. RQIIA1. Speech in One’s “Own” Voice: Interlocutory/Narrator Registers One can compare in table 6.3 the proportions of each register occurring when speakers are unambiguously speaking in their “own” voice in French and Portuguese as interlocutors (in other words when not quoting themselves or others).

126 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Table 6.3 Mean proportions of registers adopted in speakers’ “own” (narrator and interlocutor role) voice (paired t-tests). Unmarked Familiar High Vulgar Other Language

French 71.0 (SD = 5.3) 16.0 (SD = 4.1) 14.0 (SD = 4.1) 0.9 (SD = 0.9) 0.1 (SD = 0.2)

Portuguese 75.3 (SD = 6.2) 8.8 (SD = 3.8) 15.7 (SD = 5.4) 0.2 (SD = 0.3) 1.2 (SD = 1.0)

t -2.58

p= .017

6.74

.000

-1.50

.147

3.80

.001

-4.65

.000

Note: df = 22

Results indicate that when participants speak in their “own” voices (interlocutor role), they use greater percentages of colloquial speech (familiar and vulgar) in French than in Portuguese. This shows that participants make greater use of register variation to present current personas and attitudes in French than in Portuguese. In an example below, we see this divergence in interlocutory register between French and Portuguese. In French the speaker adopts a much more extreme, colloquial style. What in Portuguese is rendered as “at that time when we liked getting interested in boys,” in French is both more elaborated and punctuated by the parenthetical “bull-shit” comment, conveying a different, perhaps harsher persona and attitude toward the event. The “same” interlocutory speech that appears in different registers in the two versions has been boldfaced. Excerpt 6.4 Contrasting interlocutory register: Portuguese A: já faz uns anitos, já fazem, um tinha eu uns quatorze quinze anos,

French A: alors à ce moment-là, quel âge je devais avoir, je devais avoir euh, chais pas, dans les quatorze-quinze ans,

àquela época onde nós já que gostávamos de nos interessar aos rapazes, aquela que, coisa toda que acontece?

tu sais, un moment, à une époque où, tout le monde te demande, “Ah un garçon, machin,” I: ouais A: et c’est vrai qu’on qu’on s’intéressait à fond, on se faisait toujours belle entre guillemets pour aller prendre une glace au

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 127

café, enfin, des trucs, I: ouais A: des conneries, English translation of Portuguese A: it’s been years (dim.), it’s been, um I was around fourteen-fifteen,

English translation of French A: so at that time, how old must I have been, I must have been euh, I dunno, around fourteen-fifteen,

at that time when we liked getting interested in boys, that that whole thing that happens?

you know, a time, at a period when, everybody asks you “ Oh, a boy, and all,” I: yeah A: and it’s true that we were totally interested, we always made ourselves quote-unquote pretty to go get ice cream at the café, well, stuff, I: yeah A: bullshit,

Note how virtually the same events are presented, but in French the speaker shifts into a familiar and vulgar register. Even though this is a pasttense narration, the marked register items are not attributed to characters in the narrated event. The speaker’s use of familiar speech indexes her as a user of such forms in the current interaction, at the moment of storytelling. These trends are also apparent, for example, when this speaker described a character who was ashamed. The marked interlocutory register items have been boldfaced. Excerpt 6.5 contrasting interlocutory register: French et euh elle avait honte. elle avait les boules pa’c’que là elle était toute seule.

Portuguese pelo momento teve, teve vergonha, porque não tinha di-, não dizia nada, e punha os olhos ao chão.

English translation of French and um she was ashamed. her balls were in her throat because there she was all alone.

English translation of Portuguese for the moment, she was, she was ashamed, because she hadn’t sai-, wasn’t saying anything, and she was looking at the ground.

In the French version she said about this character, “Elle avait les boules,” a very familiar expression evoking the image of being so ashamed or afraid that one’s testicles rise to one’s throat. In the Portuguese version she said

128 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

about this character, “Ela teve vergonha,” a rather neutral way of saying “She was ashamed.” Following the storytellings, the speaker told me she had been frustrated at not being able to use a comparable register in Portuguese in that instance, pointing to her awareness of using nonequivalent registers in French and Portuguese. Overall, we see in these results and examples that in presenting their own here-and-now personas, participants consistently use a wider range of socially marked ways of speaking in French than they do in Portuguese. RQIIA2. Interlocutory Device Repertoires As shown above, speakers use consistently more interlocutor role speech in French than in Portuguese. Indeed, speakers use not only different amounts, but different types of interlocutory devices in French and Portuguese. As elaborated in the description of the coding scheme, to facilitate comparison between Portuguese and French, comparable categories of interlocutory devices were identified that could be applied to both languages (parentheticals, shifts in register,4 intensifiers, discourse markers, use of second-person pronoun, gasps, interjections, laughter, and sighs). In this way, one could compare speakers’ use of specific devices, such as interjections, between French and Portuguese. There is, however, a danger of looking at the amount of any single device in isolation, without considering how it functions relative to the other devices that co-occur with it. For example, greater amounts of a single interlocutory device alone cannot reveal whether speakers are more “emotional” in one language or another. Instead, if one examines the sets of devices speakers use together in each language, one can determine the relative frequency of each different device—in other words, the proportions of each device to the larger set within each language. Taken together, these devices can then be considered to comprise the repertoires within which interlocutory stance is expressed in each language. With this approach, we can also ask what percentages of this role are performed by which devices within the interlocutory role. In this way, an overall greater degree of interlocutory involvement in one language does not confound the question of whether speakers use entirely different kinds of interlocutory strategies within each language. What proportions of the different devices do speakers use within each language? In table 6.4, I present the profile of the proportions of devices that speakers use in each language. In French, the four most frequent interlocutory strategies, in descending order, include register shifts in general (32.1%), especially shifts to a familiar register (16.4%), parentheticals (23.7%), discourse markers (19.6%), and intensifiers (17.8%). In Portuguese, they are parentheticals (27.1%), register shifts (28.8%) (especially shifts to a higher register [18.3%]), intensifiers (23.9%), and discourse markers (11.1%). In French, in particular, speakers use far more discourse markers and shifts to a familiar

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 129

register (16.4%), whereas shifts to a familiar register only comprise 9.4% of the interlocutory devices used in Portuguese. That is, in French, people rely more on shifts to more colloquial stylistic or register variation to show interlocutory and affective engagement. In Portuguese, speakers use proportionally more quantifying intensifiers, parentheticals, and laughter. Together, these different French and Portuguese sets of devices reveal that although people are able to use multiple resources in both languages to show affect, they do not use the same combinations of resources. Table 6.4 Mean percentages of each type of interlocutory device, of all interlocutory devices (paired t-tests). Shifts to familiar Shifts to high Shifts to vulgar Shifts to other Language Total shifts Intensifiers Second person Interjections

Discourse markers Parentheticals Laughter Sighs

Gasps Note: df = 22

French 16.4 (SD=4.0) 14.7 (SD=3.8) 0.83 (SD=0.9) 0.11 (SD=0.2) 32.1 (SD=5.0) 17.8 (SD = 4.4) 2.1 (SD = 2.4) 0.9 (SD = 0.8)

Portuguese 9.4 (SD = 3.0) 18.3 (SD = 5.7) 0.21 (SD = 0.4) 1.1 (SD = 1.0) 28.8 (SD = 5.7) 23.9 (SD = 6.6) 1.2 (SD = 2.3) 0.7 (SD = 0.7)

19.6 (SD = 6.5) 23.7 (SD = 6.1) 3.4 (SD = 2.8) 0.1 (SD = 0.2)

11.1 (SD = 3.7) 27.1 (SD = 6.9) 5.1 (SD = 4.4) 0.0 (SD = 0.1)

0.1 (SD = 0.1)

0.0 (SD = 0)

t 7.00

p= .000

-3.77

.001

3.63

.001

-4.63

.000

2.55

.018

-6.87

.000

2.41

.025

0.70

7.03

.492 (not significant) .000

-2.55

.018

-2.20

.039

1.75

.093 (not significant) .003

3.33

130 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

To illustrate these different interlocutory repertoires, one can compare French and Portuguese segments of a story, where each device has been coded in boldface. Excerpt 6.6 Two versions of same story with different interlocutory devices: Portuguese A: achei graça, foi o dia, euh, eu tinha um cão

French A: C’est mon chien ^ ,une fois où je me suis bien+*fendue la gueule,**

I: mh A: que se chamava as-, astérix, uma coisa assim^, e achei-lhe graça, foi o dia onde um jehova veio à casa. e o cão, não sei ^ o que lhe de o que lhe deu, mas desata* a ladrar,

o tipo* tive teve tanto+ medo que desceu logo+ as escadas a descer -se a correr I: hm

A: nunca mais+ puseram os pés em casa.

English translation of Portuguese A: I thought it was funny, it was the day uh, I had a dog I: mh A: whose name was as- astérix, something like that,^ and I thought is was funny of him, it was the day when a jehova came to the house, and the dog, I don’t know^ what ha- to him, what happened to him,

p’ce que, y a un Jehova qui se pointe* à la maison, et puis euh, le chien a complètement+ pété les plonches*, et ben je, c’était un bon chien de garde, normalement non,^ mais là^ I: ((laugh)) A: et il a commencé a aboyé, le mec** a pris* peur, ben$, il a eu tellement+ peur qu’il a dévalé+ les escaliers en en trois, I: ((laugh)) A: en trois, trois temps, deux, deux moments, tu vois$, et puis il s’est retrouvé en bas, et il s’est cassé*, et plus jamais+, il y en a plus jamais+ aucun+ qui est venu nous nous I: ah ouais A: emmerder.* English translation of French A: it’s my dog^, one time when I really (fam) +* busted a gut**,

because, there’s a jehova who turns up* at the house. and then uh, the dog totally* busted

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 131

but he bursts *out barking,

and the guy * were-was so+ scared that he went down the stairs right away+, going down running I: hm

A: they never again+ set foot in the house.

a fuse*, and well uh,$ he was a good watchdog, normally not,^ but then^ I: ((laugh)) A: and he started barking, the dude** became* scared, well,$ he was so+ scared that he tumbled down* the stairs in in three I: ((laugh)) A: in three three times, two two moments, y’see$, and then he ended up downstairs, and he split *, and never again+, there were never again+any more+ who came to I: oh yeah A: to be a pain in our ass. *

In both segments, this speaker uses multiple interlocutory devices—parentheticals, intensifiers, discourse markers, register shifts. However, in the French, in this single stretch she uses an extremely colloquial register (fendue la gueule, se pointe, péter les plombs, le mec, se casser, dévaler, emmerder); in the Portuguese, most of her stance is communicated through quantifying intensifiers, (nunca mais, logo, tanto).5 Therefore, overall one sees that speakers do not only express different degrees of interlocutory role speech in each language, but they also use different registers and repertoires of discursive strategies to do so. They are indeed using different resources to display current self and affect.6 These results also indicate that speakers systematically use a different and wider set of interlocutory strategies in French. Just as Labov (1972b) compared the complexity of evaluative devices used by children of different ages and social groups, one could argue that this differences shows that speakers have access to and use a more complex, developed set of interlocutory devices in French. As we will discuss further below, one can speculate about the reasons for this difference, in other words, whether it results from speakers’ linguistic ability in each language, their sense of entitlement to adopt equivalent personas and stances in each language, or broader French and Portuguese norms of interlocutory and affective display. Regardless of the reason, the difference nonetheless may have consequences for the discrepancy in persona and stance that they report. These differences may indeed contribute to speakers’ sense of feeling different in their two languages, described in chapter 4.

132 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

RQIIB Character Role Strategies; Character Presentational Strategies: Personas of There-and-Then Selves and Others As replaying of quoted characters is a key part of speakers’ stories, in addition to speech in the interlocutory role, I also investigate how speakers present and perform the speech in the role of characters in the narrated event. This involves investigating the speech registers and perspectives in which these there-and then personas are made to speak. RQIIB1. Perspectives of Quoted Speakers: Presentation of Interior Monologues As described above, to better identify how self and other are presented as quoted characters, I coded whether particular instances of character speech were from the character of self (the speaker in the narrated event) or other (a third-person in the narrated event). Ultimately, distinguishing between first-person and third-person quotation allows us to compare how self and other are presented in each language. I first determined if there are patterns as to who gets quoted more and in what types of interactions in each language. Do speakers have the same characters speak equally extensively in both versions, or are speakers more likely to present the speech of their own character (C1) more or less than the speech of other characters (C3) in one language or the other? Are first-person or thirdperson characters presented as interacting with each other? Are characters’ thoughts presented as quotations? There is no consistent cross-subject trend to indicate that speakers present first- or third-person character speech more in one language or the other. This means that speakers are just as likely to quote themselves as they are to quote others in both languages. However, while there are no overall differences in how much speakers quote themselves (C1) versus others (C3) in French or Portuguese, speakers re-present the interior monologues of characters (of self and other) in direct quotation more in French. Quoting characters’ thoughts is one site where people display their own and others’ subjectivities. This difference is most striking in the percentages with which people use quoted speech to present their own first-person characters’ thoughts (C1-1).7 These differences lend a greater sense of characters’ (especially quoted selves’) interiority in stories told in French—as audiences are given a greater display of characters’ (supposed) inner speech.

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 133

Table 6.5 Mean proportions of different types of first- and third-person interactions presented in direct discourse, out of all direct discourse (paired t-tests). Percentage of all direct discourse rendered as: C1-1 (first-person interior monologue or thought presentation) C1-3 (speech from first-person to third person characters) C 3-1 (speech from third-person to first-person characters) C 3-3 (third-person interior monologue or thought presentation) C3-3 (speech from third-person to other third person characters)

French

Portuguese

t

p=

15.3 (SD = 12.2)

5.9 (SD = 7.9)

3.63

.001

24.3 (SD = 17.2)

26.8 (SD = 22.4)

-0.78

.444

42.1 (SD = 27.3)

53.2 (SD = 30.9)

-1.66

.111

5.2 (SD = 11.2)

0.7 (SD=2.0)

1.88

.073

13.2 (SD = 18.0)

13.4 (SD = 20.0)

-.027

.979

Note: df= 22

One sees an example of this trend in the following excerpt in which the speaker recounts how her uncle talked about her and her boyfriend behind her back. In both versions, we learn that she did not appreciate her uncle’s remarks. However, the same content is put into a different set of voices in each version. In the French, she presents her objection to this as her own interior monologue, in directly quoted speech, “Je me suis dit, ‘c’est mon oncle, il a pas-’” and “Je me suis dit, ‘Mes parents, ils acceptent, et lui, c’est mon oncle euh, bon, il a rien à dire.” In Portuguese, the equivalent segment of the story is presented from a narrator and interlocutory perspective: “porque eu, prontos,

134 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

eu quando andei co’ ele, tinha maioridade, não é,” and again “os meus pais não me disseram nada.” We are thus given more of a display of her thinking in French. Quoted interior monologues have been underlined. Excerpts 6.7 Different amounts of first-person characters’ reported thoughts: Portuguese A: ele mandou lá umas bocas.

e eu prontos, era meu tio. e eu, não fiquei , não fiquei a gostar euh. porque eu, prontos , eu quando andei co’ ele, tinha maioridade, não é,

French A: et puis bon, il a critiqué euh à droite et à gauche, quoi, qu’il était comme ci, qu’il était comme ça, que, que moi, bon, j’étais pas mieux de traîner avec lui. I: mh A: et bon, moi, on me l’avait pas dit . mais c’est un de mes cousins qui, bon, lui, il aime bien les p’tites histoires , comme ça. donc il était tout content, il est venu me le dire. et puis bon, j’ai pas apprécié, je me suis dit, “c’est mon oncle , il a pas–,” surtout, bon, m- à la limite , il me l’aurait dit, i’ m’aurait fait t’es sûr que bon. mais bon, je veux dire, il avait rien à voir dans l’histoire.

os meus pais não me disseram nada .

et puis euh, je me suis dit, “mes parents, ils acceptent , et lui, c’est mon oncle euh, bon, il a rien à dire.”

English translation of Portuguese A: he spread some rumors there.

English translation of French A: and then okay, he criticized left and right, y’know, that he was like this, that he was like that, that, that I, okay, I wasn’t any better to be dragging/hanging around with him. I: mh A: and okay, I hadn’t been told. but it’s one of my cousins who, well, he likes little stories, like that. so he was all happy. he came to tell me. and well, I didn’t appreciate it. I said to myself, “he’s my uncle , he has no right–,” especially, okay, bu- maybe at most , if he’d told me, if he’d been like to

and I , okay he was my uncle , and I, I didn’t, I didn’t like it euh.

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 135

because I, okay , I when I went with him, I was of age, you know,

my parents didn’t say anything to me.

me you’re sure that, well , but okay, I mean , he had nothing to do with it, and then uh, I said to myself, “it’s okay with my parents , and he’s my uncle euh, well, he has no right to say anything.”

Note the following example as well. In the French version of this story, the speaker performs for us what we are to take as her thoughts at the time: “What the hell is that thing.” This feature is absent from the Portuguese version. This quoted thought is underlined. Excerpt 6.8 Different amounts of first-person characters’ reported thoughts: Portuguese A: eh, foi em Portugal,

estava assentada na beira dum- dum muro, e então foi um gafanhoto, tava aqui, pousado em cima do- do ombro, e: e então o meu primo virase p’rá mim, disse assim

“olha, tens aí um um bicho no ombro” mandei um gri(h)to, um pulo, quando vi o bicho por que, eu, eh, tudo que é assim:, bicho, t dá-me muito: medo, não é bem nojo é mesmo medo d- de:...

English translation of Portuguese A: uh, it was in Portugal,

I was sitting on near a a wall, and so it was a grasshoper, it was here, om top of—of my shoulder, a:nd and and so my cousin turns to me , and said like this,

French A:c’était en vacances, j’étais [assI: [pace’que là A: j’étais assise, sur un p’tit mur. et j’étais avec des copains. et euh (.), et y ‘a une saut’relle qui s’était posée sur mon- sur mon épaule et bon comme i savent très bien que j’ai euh- j’ai horreur des p’tites bêtes. y’ a mon cousin qui fait comme ça “tiens, t’as une petite bête sur euh, ton épaule,” ((gasp)), quand j’l’ai vu, j’ai sauté, j’ai (.) gueulé comme une malade je me suis dit, “c’est quoi cette horreur,” alors c’était une petite bête vraiment insignifiante quoi mais bon euh, vu qu’ j’en ai tell’ment peur, moi dès qu’ y’ a une petite bête euh… English translation of French A: it was on vacation, I was [sit– I: [because there A: I was sitting, on a little wall. and I was with friends. and um (.), there’s a grasshopper who had landed on my- on my shoulder and okay ‘cause they know very well that I I hate little bugs. there’s my

136 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

“look, you have a a bug there on your shoulder.” I let out a scre(h)am, a jump, when I saw the bug because I, um, everything that’s like that:, bugs, scares me a lo:t, scares, it’s not really disgust, it’s really fear o- o:f ...

cousin who’s like, “hey, you’ve got a little bug on uh, your shoulder,” ((gasp)), when I saw it, I jumped, I (.) yelled (vulg.) like a crazy person I said to myself “what the hell is that thing,” even though it was a little really insignificant bug, like, but okay um, given that I’m so scared of them, as soon as there’s a little bug. . .

The quantitative results and these illustrative examples show that people are thus more likely to render the same events in French by performing their characters’ “inner speech.” Speakers therefore give us a different type of display of their subjectivity in each language. As analysis of actual discourse does not give us direct access to mental processes, one should not necessarily conclude that these women actually think more in French. However, because of speakers’ greater recourse to this narrative strategy, this might indeed give listeners a sense of a more intimate-seeming performance of self in French than in Portuguese. These results demonstrate an additional difference in the discourse patterns that speakers use to present themselves in narratives in their two languages. RQIIB2. Character Register As discussed above, people often place a range of sociolinguistically marked forms in characters’ mouths. In so doing, speakers compellingly evoke images of local social types, while situating themselves in the here-and-now relative to those images. I determined how different registers of speech are distributed across different quoted characters. Speakers in this study consistently performed characters in different sets of registers in French and in Portuguese. Below we will compare the registers speakers use in the mouths of quoted selves in both languages and the mouths of quoted others in both languages. This will reveal further divergences in how speakers present characters of selves and others in their two languages. RQIIB2a. Registers Used by Quoted Selves, French versus Portuguese. First, I examined the registers that directly quoted incarnations of self (C1) use.

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 137

Table 6.6 Mean percentages of registers used when speakers quote themselves in direct discourse (paired t-tests). C1-unmarked C1-familiar C1-high C1-vulgar C1-other language

French 58.6 (SD = 15.1) 29.3 (SD = 14.8) 8.4 (SD = 6.7) 1.2 (SD = 2.1) 3.9 (SD = 12.1)

Portuguese 65.4 (SD = 28.3) 11.2 (SD = 11.3) 20.4 (SD = 30.0) 2.1 (SD = 7.8) 1.5 (SD = 5.9)

t -.803

p= .433

4.604

.000

-1.557

.138

-4.54

.655

1.498

.152

Note: df = 17

Speakers are more likely to quote themselves in French, speaking in a more familiar style. Indeed when speakers quote themselves directly (C1), a higher proportion of that self-quotation appears in a familiar register in French than in Portuguese. Note the following example of how one speaker quotes the thoughts of her once teenage self. In both versions she quotes her character wondering what a group of people were doing in a cemetery late at night. These quotes have been underlined below. Notice the register difference in the words she puts in the mouth of the character of her sixteen-year-old self. 8 Excerpt 6.9 Two tellings of same story with different amount of selfquotation in a marked register: Portuguese achei aquilo estranho, “mas, o quê é que aquelas pessoas estão ali a fazer?”

French je me suis dit, “merde, qu’est-ce qu’ils foutent là-bas à cette heure-là?”

English translation of Portuguese I thought it was strange, “but, what are those people over there doing?”

English translation of French I said to myself, “shit, what the fuck/hell are they doing over there at this hour?”

In Portuguese, there is nothing noteworthy about the register in which this speaker quotes herself. We are presented with directly quoted voice of a firstperson character whose thought processes are (re)played. In French, the speaker also directly quotes the inner speech of the character of her once-teenage self. However, even in the translation of the French version, we see the speaker makes her own character adopt a very colloquial register. This trend of quoting oneself in a very familiar register in French is true both for speakers’ quoted thoughts and when people quote themselves talking

138 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

to others. In particular this can take the form of more self-assertion in conflicts in French, potentially creating the impression of a more aggressive persona. This is evident in the following excerpt, where the speaker has told a story about a stranger yelling ethnic and sexual slurs at her for staying too long on a pay phone. In the Portuguese, she quotes her direct reply to him, as a suggestion that they both drop the matter. In the French, she goes on to also report her direct response to him. She uses the formal address form (vous), but with the vulgar con. In fact, as will be discussed at greater length in chapter 8, listeners reacted to this speaker as more aggressive and assertive in the French version. In the French version, they saw her as returning his insult, with something comparably vulgar. In the Portuguese version they imagined the speaker as walking away from the conflict. Excerpt 6.10 Tellings of same story with different amount of self-quotation in a marked register: Portuguese portanto, disse assim , “’tá bem, ‘tá bem, tens razão, vai lá, vai lá a tua vida, que eu vou à minha.”

French alors, je me suis dit, “okay, d’accord, d’accord, d’accord, okay, c’est ta vie, moi j’ai la mienne.” je l’ai traité de, “de toute façon, vous êtes qu’un con, pour insulter des gens comme ça, euh.”

English translation of Portuguese so, I said like this, “okay, okay, you’re (fam.) right, go on (fam.), go on (fam.) with your life, as I’m going on with mine.”

English translation of French so, I said to myself, “okay, okay,okay, okay, okay, it’s your life(fam.), I have my own.” I called him a, “at any rate, you’re just an asshole/idiot , to insult people like that, uh.”

As speakers do consistently use more familiar and vulgar speech in their quotes of themselves with others in French, this may indeed yield the consistent impression that they are more aggressive in French. In other words, by quoting themselves in these different registers, speakers may make themselves come across as a different kind of person, within local French and Portuguese ideologies that link register usage to socially locatable stereotypes.

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 139

RQIIB2b. Registers Used by Quoted Others, French versus Portuguese One can then ask how speakers present others as characters in French versus Portuguese. Table 6.7 Mean percentages of registers used to quote others (third-person characters) out of all third-person quotation (C3) (paired t-tests). C3 unmarked C3 familiar C3 high C3 vulgar C3 other language

French 47.9 (SD = 22.2) 38.3 (SD = 19.8) 11.4 (SD = 13.8) 2.7 (SD = 8.9) 1.4 (SD = 3.1)

Portuguese 54.3 (SD = 22.7) 32.7 (SD = 26.1) 9.1 (SD = 10.2) 0.7 (SD = 1.7) 3.5 (SD = 8.0)

t -0.913

p= .371

0.712

.484

0.700

.491

0.288

1.089

-1.137

.268

Note: df = 22

There is no statistically significant difference between the registers in which people quote others in French versus Portuguese. However, if one compares within each language the differences between how first and third person characters speak (do people quote others consistently more familiarly than they quote themselves?), an intriguing pattern emerges in Portuguese. RQIIB2c. Difference between Registers Used by Quoted Selves versus Quoted Others, French versus Portuguese Looking at the relationship between how speakers’ put familiar speech in others’ mouths (third-person characters) versus in the mouths of their own characters (first-person characters), there is a statistically significant difference only in Portuguese. This means that in Portuguese, speakers are more likely to show others speaking familiarly than to show themselves doing so. There are no significant differences in the French—that is, speakers are just as likely to present themselves and others speaking in “lower” styles, and inhabiting the types of personas who would speak/act in such a manner.

140 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Table 6.8 Mean percentage of quotation of self (C1) versus quotation of others (C3) in a familiar register (paired t-tests).

French

Portuguese

%C1 familiar 32.3 (SD = 22.2) 11.2 (SD = 10.9)

%C3 familiar 36.2 (SD = 14.8) 23.8 (SD = 14.6)

t

p=

df

0.67

.510

20

3.28

.004

18

This supports the notion that speakers use less colloquial speech in Portuguese than French, not from lack of knowledge of it, but from their sense of its inappropriateness in their own mouths. By their greater willingness to quote others’ using colloquial Portuguese, they display awareness of it. By their lesser use of it in their interlocutor and first-person character speech, they show their reluctance to use it themselves. This trend is illustrated in the following example. The relevant segments have been underlined. Excerpt 6.11 Portuguese story showing third-person characters using colloquial speech: Portuguese uma tarde, há pouco tempo, fómos fazer um piquenique, p’ra, p’ra Versailles ((said in French)) ,com uns colegas. éramos sete ou oito. e: um deles tinha uma viola, e: e ele tocava sempre a mesma música. e os outros andavam à desgarrada, portanto. cada um inventava um verso, euhm um verso pa- acompanhar o toque da guitara , mas eram versos muito porcos aa, por que eles são do, são da Serra da Estrela com aquele sotaque. ‘tão sempre no “ foda-se e caralho” e, ‘tão sempre a falar assim.

English translation one afternoon, a little while ago, we went to have a picnic, to, to Versailles ((said in French)), with some friends. there were seven or eight of us. a:nd, one of them had a guitar, a:nd and he was always playing the same music. and the others were acting strange, so. each one was making up lines, a verse to go along with the guitar playing, but they were very dirty lines, um, because they’re from the, they’re Serra da Estrela with that accent. they’re always, “fuck and shit,( (lit. “penis” ))” and, they’re always talking like that.

In this Portuguese example, the speaker attributes vulgarisms to the quoted speakers to describe their style as being particular types who talk in particular ways. She demonstrates that she recognizes the social meaning of the quoted lexical items, but those items are not in her own mouth. They are protectively enveloped by quotation marks. Relevant to this finding, Goffman (1974/1986:539) directly noted, “In quoting another’s use of curse words and other taboo utterances, some license is provided beyond what the speaker can employ on his own behalf, but where does this license stop?” That speakers

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 141

consistently use fewer colloquial forms in their own interlocutory and character speech, but will permit them in the character speech of others, shows that speakers mark clear boundaries between quoted selves and others in Portuguese. In this way, one sees two trends in how speakers present quoted others. Speakers are somewhat more likely to make quoted others speak more “colorfully” in French than in Portuguese. In Portuguese, on the one hand, they are much more likely to quote others using colloquial and taboo words than to use them themselves. As such, these bilinguals use colloquial linguistic resources in Portuguese, but keep the personas who use them at arm’s length. On the other hand, in French the same speakers readily used such resources as “their own,” both when speaking as interlocutors and when quoting themselves. Together, there is strong empirical evidence of French versus Portuguese differences in the speaker role perspectives and associated register/language use these bilinguals employ. Conclusion Similar to Goffman’s (1979/1981) critique of unitary notions of “speaker,” this analysis has shown how speakers’ “selves” are not monolithic in any language. The “self” in a narrative emerges from how the speaker orchestrates different speaker roles and language varieties from past, present, and imagined speech events. Although speakers themselves may talk about their French or Portuguese-speaking identities as if these were unified, static identities, we have seen that they are multivoiced discursive accomplishments. The analyses indicate that these bilinguals “do” self-narration differently in French and Portuguese. These women use different discursive strategies in both languages to display and comment upon self and other in the here-andnow, and in the story worlds of narrated events. Let us summarize and interpret the trends we have empirically found. In both languages, speakers did more than just report plot—speaking to some degree from the perspective of all three speaker roles (narrator, interlocutor, and character) in French and Portuguese. Speakers relate the “same” events from different perspectives in French and Portuguese. Specifically, speakers perform the roles of interlocutor and narrator to differing extents in French and Portuguese, telling more of the story as a neutral narrator in Portuguese, and more as an interlocutor in French, attending more to the ongoing relationship between speaker and listener, and to affective expression. Interestingly, speakers performed to similar extents the roles of characters through some form of quoted speech in both languages. One would guess that participants are likely to experience French tellings as more affectively engaged. This will be confirmed when we look at listener reactions in chapter 7.

142 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Furthermore, elaborating on the character role, I found that speakers do not provide more quotation when telling a story in the language in which it originally occurred. They are able to construct vivid dialogue (Tannen 1989) in either language. This supports discussions by Koven (2001), Hill and Hill (1986), and Álvarez-Cáccamo (1996) that it is not so much a concern for faithful representation, but for the social values and personas associated with each language that determine how speakers report speech in both languages. Moreover, how these speakers inhabit these roles is notably different in each language—they use different kinds of resources to present their current and character personas in the interlocutory and character roles in French and Portuguese. A greater portion of their interlocutor speech appears in a more colloquial register in French. In the interlocutory role, they use different combinations of devices, relying more on greater use of colloquial language to convey current attitude and persona in French than in Portuguese. In the character role, they are also consistently different in French and Portuguese. Speakers navigate the boundaries between quoted and nonquoted personas differently in their two languages. In both languages, they present images of themselves and of others as quoted characters, at some remove from who they are as here-and-now interlocutors. However, at times they use quotation to different ends and in different ways. They quote characters’ thoughts more in French, presenting an “interior” view of the characters. Speakers are more willing to quote themselves speaking colloquially in French than in Portuguese. However, in Portuguese, speakers do let characters other than themselves (third-person characters) use quite colloquial speech. Again, this reveals these women’s knowledge of Portuguese colloquial modes of speaking but unwillingness to adopt that speech as their “own.” That they do this in both languages indicates their awareness of the potency of different ways of speaking in both of their languages, and of the relationship between speaker identity and language usage—who may and may not speak in a particular way. In both quoted and nonquoted discourse, these women perform more “extreme” incarnations of themselves and others in French than in Portuguese. These speakers may indeed have more control over their self-presentations in French than in Portuguese contexts in general. These speakers’ more flexible quoted and nonquoted self-presentations in French may point to a greater range of socially available identities to which they have access and with which they can be creative in French contexts. From the discussion in chapter 4 of people’s explicit remarks about their French and Portuguese, several pointed out the nonequivalent vocabulary that they use in each language. Many commented specifically on their greater use of familiar and “young” vocabulary in French than in Portuguese. This be-

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 143

comes an example of how participants’ experience of difference is locatable in and correlates with their specific discourse patterns.9 What causes these differences? Are they the result of differences in conventions of the two languages? The speakers’ differential ability in the two languages? Or their sense of how they are entitled to speak and who they are entitled to sound like in each, because of the different identities they assume in French and Portuguese? Below I consider each of these three explanations in turn. More Generalized French and Portuguese Conventions? Indeed, although there has been significant within-language research on French and Portuguese monolinguals,10 there has been relatively little comparative work. Further comparative work on whether monolingual speakers of French or Portuguese use similar strategies will allow one to determine the role of French and Portuguese available narrative conventions in bilinguals’ different self-presentations. Differential Ability? One might argue that although these speakers are fluent bilinguals, they may not productively master an equivalent range of registers in French and Portuguese. Psycholinguistic authors have explored this issue of mastery that may account for bilinguals’ unequal use of and/or reaction to profanity in their two languages (Dewaele 2004a, 2004b 2006; Dewaele and Regan 2001; Harris, Ayçiçegi, and Gleason 2003; Harris, Gleason, and Ayçiçegi 2006). Dewaele has found, for example, that multilinguals typically swear more in their first language. The author asks whether this is because of “conscious avoidance or of incomplete knowledge.” (2004:2).11 Harris, Ayçiçegi, and Gleason (2003) found that late bilinguals show greater skin conductivity, a measure of autonomic arousal, when reacting to taboo words in their first language. These authors argue that bilinguals experience the greater force of “strong” language more in the first, and (typically) better-mastered language. With this perspective, LD women could be understood to use more colloquial language in French because of their better mastery of it. That said, in later work (Dewaele 2006; Harris, Ayçiçegi, and Gleason 2003; Harris, Gleason, and Ayçiçegi 2006; Pavlenko 2006a), scholars argue that if socialized into their second (or third, and so forth) language in socially and emotionally complex contexts, speakers may be quite capable of producing and responding to affectively laden profanity in their second language. In other words, speakers can and do develop “competence” in a range of socially marked registers, if they have access to and are socialized in the right contexts of acquisition and use. Indeed, LD bilinguals have learned and used both lan-

144 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

guages in sociolinguistically complex contexts in both France and Portugal, across a variety of settings. Access to Different Personas? As Agha (2004) points out, because differential access to registers is the norm, no individual speaker masters all extant registers within a speech community. In this way, even if unequal competence is part of the issue that accounts for why LDs use certain registers more in French than in Portuguese, competence to use particular registers is not a neutral, context-free skill, but is inextricably tied to speakers’ social location(s) in their communities. Following Bakhtin, different ways of speaking are never neutral—they always “belong” to some people more than to others. The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language . . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own . . . not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves into quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions.(1981: 293–294)

Differential competence and access to different identities are thus tightly connected. Similarly Blommaert notes: People construct identities out of specific configurations of semiotic resources, and consequently, just as linguistic and semiotic repertoires are conditioned by dynamics of access, identity repertoires will likewise be conditioned by unequal forms of access to particular identity-building resources. (2005: 207)

In this regard, register competence and identity are not distinctly separate orders of phenomena. The registers speakers command are themselves signs of identity. Access to specific registers and access to particular local types of personas are thus tightly interwoven. Irvine (1990), Kulick (1992), Garrett (2005), and Eckert (2000) provide ethnographic examples of situations where speakers, monolingual or multilingual, might use a subset of the available ways of speaking within their speech community, because of their positioning as particular types of persons within that community. For example, Kulick describes a bilingual context where gender, persona, affect, profanity, and language are complexly intertwined. The use of the indigenous language (and of profanity in that language) is tied up with increasingly devalued expressions of anger, femaleness, and ultimately backwardness. On the other hand, the use of Tok Pisin is associated with men, greater diplomacy, and modernity. Without ex-

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 145

plaining the complex contexts and personas associated with the learning and use of each language, it is not sufficient to say that women do not “know” Tok Pisin, or that the men don’t “know” Taiep. Multiple ways of speaking are always associated with different personas and contexts. Speakers’ incomplete use of all the expressive resources within a “language,” thus does not result from reasons of lack of skill or mastery, defined in the abstract. Rather, because different ways of speaking are each tied up with culturally specific images of persons, a speaker inevitably associates with or distances himself/herself from particular personas, whenever he or she speaks, whether by choice or constraint. It is thus not merely a question of speakers’ ignorance of particular ways of speaking, but a question of how speakers position themselves and are positioned relative to the multiple social locations and personas that the different available ways of speaking conjure up. This latter explanation fits the situation of LD women. By demonstrating that they can quote others who swear, LD women show that they “know” more colloquial, profanity-using ways of speaking that they themselves do not directly use, partially from reluctance to use them as their own. As one woman said, “I have a hard time taking over their [“young” Portuguese in Portugal] expressions...even if I try . . . I’m gonna sound completely ridiculous . . . I tried one day. I found that stupid, it wasn’t me . . . but that I was taking up someone else’s words.” This woman states that she knows certain vocabulary that doesn’t “belong” in her mouth. We have some evidence it is also partially a sense of entitlement that may lead LD women to draw from different sociolinguistic resources in their two languages. In performances of their own quoted and nonquoted personas, LD women are perhaps not free to inhabit the persona of an aggressive, outspoken urban or suburban youth in Portuguese because of the gender and class identities available to and appropriate for them in Portuguese contexts. LD women’s register usage both results from and matters for the social identities they enact in French and Portuguese. It is thus also likely that the difference is not merely a question of the speakers’ productive competence in some abstract sense of the identities they are able to perform, but also of the social identities that they are entitled to perform in French and Portuguese sociolinguistic contexts. Whether it is a question of difference in more generalized French versus Portuguese sociolinguistic conventions, or ability and/or entitlement to use certain registers, the divergence in these LD women’s productive usage of these registers has consequences for the range of personas they can legitimately perform, that is, who they can present themselves and others as being. This need not be surprising, given that in complex sociolinguistic situations when people circulate transnationally, (as do these LD women), they often find themselves unable to use equivalent sociolinguistic resources that index comparable identities across contexts (Blommaert 2003, 2005).

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Throughout this presentation of speakers’ voicing strategies in French and Portuguese, I have shown how attention to the relationships between speakers’ quoted and nonquoted speaking roles yields insight into these women’s different strategies of identity construction and display in their two languages. Indeed, these women’s subjective experiences of self reported in chapter 4 are mirrored in the empirical facts of their different ways of speaking and displaying who they are in each language. These empirical differences may indeed contribute to the subjective experiences these women report as “feelings” and who “they are” differently in their two languages. But what are the local meanings of these forms? How are these different repertoires of verbal resources for “self-expression” understood by participants? What are the culturally recognized affects and identities expressed through them? As Besnier (1994b) points out, many studies of affect in language are tautological—authors assert that a particular stretch of discourse is more “involved” because it shows the presence of particular discursive forms to mark involvement. I will investigate how the proportions of these forms take on meaning and life to participants, in our discussion of how speakers and listeners react to use of these ways of speaking, looking at local interpretations of these different repertoires. In chapter 7, the general trends from listeners’ reactions to a subset of the stories in the corpus are discussed. By consulting these local reactions, we will learn what people react to, and experience in their own and in others’ use of those forms. We learn about participants’ metapragmatic frameworks that make natural the links between language forms and the different kinds of culturally locatable identities, attitudes, and affects they index. From this, I move from coding and analysis of linguistic form, to how the use of such forms is construed in local interpretive/metapragmatic frameworks as having particular effects and meanings that are felt to reveal speakers’ affects and selves.

1

One can further analyze role inhabitance, looking at all possible role combinations (see table 6.9). Table 6.9 Mean proportions of clauses in each of six speaker roles in stories across 23 speakers (paired t-tests)

Narrator Narrator/Interlocutor Interlocutor

French 18.3 (SD = 5.5) 18.2 (SD = 4.3) 45.7 (SD = 10.3)

Portuguese 25.1 (SD = 5.9) 18.2 (SD = 4.8) 37.6 (SD = 10.3)

t -7.853

p= .000

0.037

.971

7.741

.000

RESULTS OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOICING 147

Character Narrator/Character Interlocutor/Character

10.4 (SD = 7.5) 3.9 (SD = 2.5) 3.6 (SD = 2.1)

10.4 (SD = 8.3) 5.3 (SD = 3.4) 3.4 (SD = 2.8)

-0.035

.973

-2.772

.011

0.254

.802

Note: df = 22 If one looks at roles and role combinations, one sees a similar trend: more purely narrator speech in Portuguese and more purely interlocutor speech in French. The only additional difference that this breakdown shows is more indirect quotation in Portuguese than French. 2 Javier, Barroso, and Munoz (1993) conducted a more discursively oriented study of bilingual autobiographical memory. The authors compared how five bilinguals narrated memories of personal events, told in the original language versus the other language. Unlike most other authors, they actually compared the texts of what people said in each language. Using Chafe’s (1980) methodology for identifying thought units, they determined that narratives had greater numbers of thought units and different thought units in the two languages. From this they conclude that bilinguals tell less elaborated memories in a language other than that in which the event occurred. As noteworthy as this preliminary investigation is, questions of method and analysis emerge. First of all, participants told stories in the same order—original language then non-original language, to the same interviewer. The result that the second tellings were more truncated could partially be an effect of repetition. Analytically, that the stories were more abbreviated in the second telling is not in itself very revealing. As literature on repeated tellings of the “same” events has shown (Polanyi 1981; Norrick 1998; Bauman 1986; Koven 2001; Moore 1993), comparative length is a very coarse measure of narrative similarity or difference. The authors also report that there is more imagery and emotional texture in the first telling and a concreteness to the second. They do not, however, back this up with a principled analysis of discourse forms that underlies this. In other words, although Javier, Barroso, and Munoz (1993), provides a more discourse-oriented study of bilingual memory, it would be enhanced with attention to other features of narrative performance. 3 See Eckert (2003), Bucholtz (2003), Coupland (2003) for a discussion that problematizes the notion of authentic speech. 4 Note that register is used differently in this section. Here, register is not used in the same way as a set of categories into which all interlocutory discourse can be exhaustively assigned. Instead, here, register/language shifts are taken as individual devices, among other devices, that establish a creative interlocutory move that sustains or instantiates interlocutory role inhabitance. 5 As preliminary evidence of the effect of the use of these different strategies, note that her telling elicits laughter from the interviewer in French, but not in the Portuguese. 6 Chapter 7 further explores the significance of these different repertoires, when I discuss others' reactions to these different performances. 7 There is a trend in this direction with how the interior monologues of others are presented (C3-3), which approaches conventional levels of statistical significance in terms of percentages. 8 This resonates with the work of Drescher (2004) who found that monolingual French speakers quote themselves using profanity for dramatic effect and to present a particular version of self. 9 Of course, whether the study reported here actually simulates bilingual LDs’ displays and experiences of self in two languages outside of the interview context is an important methodological question. One should ask how much these interview contexts replicate people’s

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experiences, performances, and the impressions others have of them in everyday French and Portuguese contexts. As both tellings were elicited in France, by interviewers whom participants knew to be bilingual, one could even speculate that their two tellings would yield a less marked difference between French and Portuguese displays of self than would two tellings in naturally occurring French and Portuguese monolingual contexts. In the interviews, if people had wanted access to the affective associations of the other language, they could have codeswitched. In their everyday monolingual settings, however, LDs may have that option even less. They are often confined to the resources of one language at a time. 10 See references to scholarship about specific discourse strategies and devices used by monolingual French and monolingual Portuguese speakers in chapter 5. 11 Dewaele also noted that some bilinguals may swear in their second language to mitigate the power of the words used.

CHAPTER 7 LISTENERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF BILINGUALS IN EACH LANGUAGE

Having compared the formal discourse patterns people use in each language in chapters 5 and 6, we ask in this chapter about the effects of their coordinated use on participants. Following Lucy (1992) and Besnier (1994b), it is circular to assert that linguistic forms have certain psychological, interpersonal, or cognitive effects, if one relies exclusively on linguistic data. To understand what particular ways of talking actually index for participants, it is preferable to seek broader ethnographic contexts (Besnier 1994b). Thus, rather than just compare formal differences between French and Portuguese narrative strategies of identity presentation, I also enlisted local judgments of speakers’ identities. This chapter explores the socioculturally informed images of types of people and feelings that French-Portuguese bilinguals conjure up for others through their different ways of talking. I discuss a follow-up study in which people listened and reacted to recordings of the original bilinguals in each language. Thus, in addition to asking bilinguals directly about their experiences of identity (chapter 4), and looking at formal discursive strategies they actually use in each language (chapters 5 and 6), I also asked listeners of similar sociolinguistic background to give their impressions of the original speakers’ French and Portuguese narrative performances. Five other female Luso-descendant bilinguals, demographically similar to the speakers in the original corpus, helped me to interpret the local meanings of different ways of talking in each language. In particular, they assessed the original speakers’ differences and similarities within and across languages. By appealing to others’ reactions to (recordings of) tellings of the “same” story in two languages, one gets a better sense of how speakers’ use of specific indexical strategies summons up coherent, conventionally recognized personas and affective stances. My approach draws from Sapir’s (1927/1985) reflections on how people infer “personality” and “affect” (Irvine 1982) from different aspects of speech. It is also informed by a tradition of empirical scholarship associated with the study of language attitudes. Language attitude scholars have demonstrated how people’s reactions to different ways of speaking provide insight into local

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constructions of the relationships between language and identity (Giles and Powesland 1975; Lambert et al. 1960; Woolard 1989). This tradition of social psychological research has shown how listeners attribute different social identities to speakers of different languages or different styles within the same language. In this research paradigm, often known for its use of the “matched guise” technique, listeners react to comparable swatches of speech from speakers in different styles or languages. Without realizing that they may be evaluating the same people in two different conditions, listeners are asked to judge the recorded speakers on different dimensions of social desirability. Listeners thus evaluate each other on the basis of socially indexical, not referential aspects of speech—not what recorded speakers say, but how they say it. This research tradition has demonstrated empirically how ways of speaking mediate perceptions of identity. Traditionally, such research has been used to tap into listeners’ language attitudes. However, eliciting others’ reactions to recordings can reveal more broadly how locals link the form of an utterance with its social and psychological functions, as Gumperz (1982), Urciuoli (1998), and Schieffelin (1990) have noted. Gumperz (1982) presented panels of participants with locally recorded speech samples to show how participants interpret recorded speakers’ intentions. In this way, he demonstrated how participants rely on specific verbal forms as contextualization strategies, to communicate and interpret their own and others’ intentions. Schieffelin (1990) systematically solicited local input while transcribing recordings in the field. By having participants help her to annotate and interpret transcripts of local interactions, she came to better understand the cultural meanings and contexts indexed by talk. Urciuoli (1998) also had participants react to locally recorded speech samples, in order to explore the semiotic processes through which people link ways of speaking to socially (de)valued identities. Participants’ reactions to recordings revealed for her how local ways of talking became signs that led listeners to situate speakers as particular types of people in particular contexts. My work in this chapter builds on these more ethnographic approaches, using people’s metapragmatic commentary to illuminate local connections between speech and identity. In this chapter, I therefore examine how bilingual listeners inferred bilingual speakers’ identities from audio-recordings of oral narratives of personal experience in French and Portuguese. I will argue that in their remarks about how they imagine the recorded speakers, listeners are indeed actively responding to voicings (Bakhtin 1981), defined as the “ways in which utterances index typifiable speaking personae” (Agha 2005b:39). This chapter first discusses informal and formal procedures through which I collected such commentary. It then examines what speakers consistently heard in the French and Portuguese speech of other Luso-descendants—how

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they imagined speakers, characters, and contexts in French and Portuguese. We will see how listeners relied on speakers’ indexical cues to summon up familiar types—of people, contexts, and interactions. As Agha (1998, 2003) notes, from participants’ perspective, language variation is “naturalized in the attributes of persons” (1998:152). Similarly, as Irvine and Gal (2000) state, in many contexts, people often construe indexical relationships between language and identity as iconic, seeing the connection between a way of speaking and being as essential or intrinsic. Here we will see how listeners connect speakers’ ways of speaking and persona—indexically and iconically linking the two. Understanding such connections is critical to grasping participants’ experience of language and identity. These listener reports will ultimately reveal how others perceive bilinguals to take on a different persona in each language. When integrated with self-reports and formal analysis in chapters 5 and 6, we can then discuss what these listener reactions add to our understanding of bilingual identities. Method: Informal Listener Judgments I first realized the richness of participants’ comments about one another’s speech while receiving help with transcription of my original corpus. Before conducting a systematic study of listener reactions (described below), I reviewed my transcriptions of the original recordings with Luso-descendants. I was initially concerned with my “accuracy”—whether I had faithfully transcribed what the original speakers had said. However, I was struck by other input. Unsolicited, LD “correctors” made highly evaluative remarks about how recorded participants spoke, and how that speech conjured up vivid images of locally imaginable types of people and their associated contexts. They noted subtleties that were otherwise opaque to me, the nonnative ethnographer. Given the richness of this material, I encouraged correctors to share this metapragmatic commentary with me. Therefore, in addition to instructing people to make sure the transcript represented a complete record of what was actually said, I also asked them to note when the original speaker used a sociolinguistically marked form, and to tell me about the social and psychological “meaning” of such forms. LD correctors found reviewing my transcripts to be quite engrossing. They became fascinated by what they could imagine about the speakers. Correctors would often take the transcripts and audiocassettes home to continue work on them. There they might involve their Portuguese-speaking family members in the task, getting the comments and impressions of parents, siblings, and partners. This was apparently an intriguing activity for the whole family. The elaborateness of these remarks and the correctors’ eagerness to share them made them a valuable resource for understanding how LD speech indexed identity.

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The correctors positioned themselves in complex ways relative to the speech of the taped speakers, often explicitly comparing it to their own. Themselves French-Portuguese bilinguals who had often had their own linguistic performances scrutinized and judged, correctors were acutely aware of the effects of using different kinds of French and Portuguese. They regularly pointed out when speakers used nonstandard forms in both languages. As many had never previously seen transcripts of oral discourse in French or Portuguese, they were quick to point out all the departures of the “bad” French and Portuguese oral forms from written norms. Because correctors had all attended French schools through the university level, and had been exposed to written standard Portuguese, they were quite aware of the norms of standard in both languages. Commenting on other LDs’ language use was an opportunity to apply to others the multiple evaluative standards to which they had been subjected. In Portuguese, correctors criticized usage that was marked by nonstandard influences either from within Portugal (regional or class marking) or from French influence. For the former, they would comment that a speaker had used a lexical form or a pronunciation associated with a particular region, or that struck them as rural or old-fashioned, and would often try to guess where the speaker and her parents were from: “Only old people in the countryside talk like that” or “The person must have learned that from her parents, who didn’t attend much school” or “Can’t you hear what a peasant she sounds like?” or “She must have learned that . . . from people in the little hole where she’s from in Portugal” (emphases mine). In these remarks, we see that listeners focused on age, generation, rurality, and lack of education. Correctors were also very interested in determining whether someone’s Portuguese was “good” enough to pass for that of a nonmigrant Portuguese. When a speaker would use an expression that correctors imagined a nonmigrant Portuguese would use, especially if it sounded modern or urban, correctors would note this approvingly. Correctors were most critical when speakers would use “gallicized” forms that “no one, no real Portuguese person from over there, would say.” Such forms would typically include French syntactic, lexical, or phonological influence. In contrast to Portuguese, correctors typically made fewer comments, negative or positive, about French transcriptions. Sometimes they would merely say that the speaker sounded “normal” or “just like them.” Their fellow LDs’ French was far less interesting to them. One corrector said she did not enjoy correcting French as much as Portuguese, because French was banal for her. Unlike in Portuguese, a corrector would almost never note that a speaker’s French sounded nonnative or “Portuguese.” This confirms earlier discussions that most LDs perceive themselves and other LDs to be “native speakers” of French. Instead, in French, listeners commented on speakers’ youthfulness, so-

LISTENERS’ PERCEPTIONS 153

cial class, education, and whether they were from the suburbs, or Paris itself. As described in chapter 3, these different dimensions of identity are interrelated, lying on a continuum from “suburban” (banlieusard) to “young” (jeune) to “bourgeois.” Although suburban may appear to be a geographic ascription, young to be a generational ascription, and bourgeois to be a class ascription, each of the three simultaneously conjures up generational, class, and geographically situated images of speakers. “Sounding young” implies a contemporary, easygoing, casual attitude toward social conventions, situated in urban or suburban space. Young implies a balance between the extremes of suburban vulgarity, immaturity, lack of respect and manners, and bourgeois, old-fashioned Parisian formality and elitism. Note these multiple dimensions in the following excerpts from correctors’ comments: “That sounds like the speech of a sixteen-year-old suburbanite, and doesn’t belong in the mouth of someone at university” (where youth and suburban are opposed to university as a location where more mature, urban, and bourgeois people go). “Her way of speaking shows that she isn’t from Paris at all. I think she comes from a suburban housing project and that she must have hung out with scum. She must live north of Paris in a bad neighborhood” (where Paris is juxtaposed to less affluent and desirable suburbs and residents). From these metapragmatic commentaries during transcript correction, I was able to form more precise ideas about the kinds of intertwined and juxtaposed identities speakers draw up in each language: rural vs. urban, migrant vs. nonmigrant, educated vs. uneducated in Portuguese; young vs. mature, tough vs. refined, urban vs. suburban, unschooled vs. bourgeois in French. Correctors’ sensitivity to how specific language forms indexed different dimensions of identity proved invaluable to understanding how language and identity are intertwined for LD bilinguals. These distinctions would come up again in more systematic elicitation of listeners’ reactions, described below. Method: Controlled Peer Listening To elicit social and psychological portraits of the recorded speakers in each language in a systematic way, I drew from correctors’ rich reactions to set up a careful study of listener reactions to the original speakers in French and Portuguese. I had five female Luso-descendant bilinguals, unknown to the original speakers, listen to a sample of stories told twice, once in each language. These listeners were demographically similar to the original sample. See table 7.1 below for a brief description of the listeners’ backgrounds. I deliberately selected demographically similar listeners who would be likely to share understandings of local nuances of how LDs talk, to index attitude, affect, and identity.1 That said, these listeners cannot, of course, provide a neutral “view from nowhere” of the identities LDs perform. Because all participants are positioned within particular sociolinguistic orders, any listener’s responses are

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partial (see Irvine 2001). In future work, it would be of interest to see how listeners from other French and Portuguese “social locations” interpret speakers’ performances. Table 7.1 Listeners’ backgrounds: Listener

Age

Armanda

23

Region of origin in Portugal Beira

Education

Irene

23

Trás-os-Montes

University student of Portuguese

Vanessa

22

Minho

Rita

24

Minho/Porto

Joana

24

Beira

University student of Portuguese University student of Portuguese University student of Law

University student of Portuguese in Paris

Language history Born in France, lived ages 8-12 in Portugal; summers spent in Portugal. Born in Portugal; came to France at age 3; summers spent in Portugal. Born in France; summers spent in Portugal. Born in France; summers spent in Portugal. Born in France; summers spent in Portugal.

For my purposes, I chose listeners who share a social location similar to that of the speakers, with whom they might hold similar understandings of the meanings and effects of French and Portuguese ways of speaking. With similar sociolinguistic backgrounds, such listeners are thus well placed to share the original speakers’ interpretations of the links between speech and persona. Formal Properties of Stories in Reactive Sample As listeners typically spent between twenty and sixty minutes listening and reacting to French and Portuguese versions of any single story, it would have been impossible to have listeners react to story pairs from all twenty-three original speakers. I therefore selected a more manageably sized subset from my original corpus. Listeners therefore heard and reacted to French and Portuguese versions of eight story pairs. This still resulted in a listener-reaction corpus of over twenty hours. I selected the following eight story pairs (or sixteen

LISTENERS’ PERCEPTIONS 155

stories, i.e., French and Portuguese versions of each story), from six different speakers: 1. Teresa’s story about an accoster in a phone booth 2. Isabel’s story about a fight with a postal worker 3. Linda’s story about a fight with her mother on Mother’s Day 4. Ana’s story about being accosted in France at an Antillean (Zouc) nightclub 5. Ana’s story about being accosted in Portugal at a festival in Fafe 6. Clara’s story about being accosted in the metro about the time 7. Clara’s story about a fight with her aunt 8. Maria’s story about laughing on the phone Four of these story pairs were selected at random from the entire corpus. The other four story pairs were selected because they represented highs and lows in amounts of voicing, as measured by formal analysis: Two story pairs were selected because they contained a large amount of interlocutory and character speech; two other pairs were selected because they had much less.2 In order to determine whether listeners’ reactions to these sixteen stories are likely to be representative of how they might react to stories throughout the corpus, one should ascertain how representative these eight story pairs are of the larger corpus. To establish the similarity between these sixteen stories and the larger corpus, one can establish the similarity of the codings of these eight story pairs to those manifest in the larger corpus. If the codings of these eight story pairs are sufficiently representative of the larger trends, one can argue that listener reactions should reveal patterns of what is indexed in French and Portuguese narratives more generally.3 Indeed the stories in the listening subsample show similar trends in role occupancy to those in the larger sample.4 Like the stories in the larger corpus, stories in the listener sample contained more narration in Portuguese than in French, and more interlocutory stance in French than in Portuguese. In terms of register or language level, there is on average more familiar speech in the interlocutory, character, and first-person character frames in French than in Portuguese, similar to what was found in the larger corpus. To back this up, in tables 7.2 and 7.3, the mean proportions of each role for the story pairs in both languages appear along with the values in parentheses for the larger sample. I also show trends for language level. In table 7.3, one can see the proportions of speech in each level, in the interlocutory, character, and first-person character frame.

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Table 7.2 Mean proportion of speaker role inhabitance in French and Portuguese stories in listener subsample, as compared to larger sample5 Speaker Role Narrator Interlocutor Character

French 39.5 (40.4) 54.1 (67.5) 28.5 (17.8)

Portuguese 49.6 (48.6) 51.9 (59.2) 26.3 (19.1)

Note: Numbers in parentheses represent the mean for the larger corpus.

Table 7.3 Mean proportion of register in interlocutor, character, and firstperson character frame in listener sample versus entire corpus Version Interlocu -tory register

F P

Character register

F P

First-person character

F P

Unmarked 73.7 (71.0) 78.3 (75.3) 37.1 (48.3) 46.3 (56.3) 33.3 (58.6) 40.1 (65.4)

Familiar 14.9 (16.0) 11.6 (8.8) 31.4 (37.4) 21.6 (30.6) 19.3 (29.3) 16.6 (11.2)

High

Vulgar

10.5 (14.0) 10.1 (15.7) 6.1 (11.9) 6.5 (10.3) 10.7 (8.4) 6.2 (20.4)

1.9 (0.9) 1.5 (0.2) 0.9 (2.6) .65 (.6) 0.7 (1.2) 0.4 (2.1)

Other Language 0.2 (0.1) 0.3 (1.2) 0.0 0.0 0.0 (3.9) 0.0 (1.5)

Note: Number in parentheses represents the mean for the larger corpus.

There are thus similar quantitative trends between the eight story pairs and the larger corpus, in terms of role occupancy, language-level usage in the interlocutory frame, character frame, and first-person character frame. This suggests that listener reactions to these stories should resemble, to some extent, those that would be found for the larger corpus. Procedures Formal listener-reaction sessions were conducted in a relaxed setting (my home or listeners’ home), with only myself and one listener present. I told each listener that she would hear stories and that she should try to imagine the speaker as one might imagine someone overheard on public transportation. In essence, I asked her to assume the role of unratified overhearer (Goffman 1979/1981). Listeners could listen to each version of each story twice. Then in a series of open-ended oral questions, I asked people to:

LISTENERS’ PERCEPTIONS 157

• • • • • • •

summarize the plot of the story they had just heard tell me generally about the recorded speaker’s way of speaking in each language tell me what level(s) of language the speaker used—formal, everyday, familiar, or vulgar (see below for a discussion of the meaning of these speech levels) tell me the kind of person they imagined the speaker to be, and whether they could imagine being friends with the speaker tell me about the speaker’s affective state and intensity tell me how they imagined other characters in the story tell me how they imagined the general context in which the story took place

After they responded aurally and orally to the recordings, with a discussion of those aspects of the story that struck them as salient, I let them look at written transcripts of the two tellings. To address the comparability of specific segments of two tellings, I then asked them to compare the “meanings” of specific forms used in each version at comparable moments of French and Portuguese tellings, directly from the written transcript.6 These listening sessions were audio-recorded and have since been transcribed. As stated above, the entire task of listening to both versions of eight stories took between two and a half and five hours with each listener, resulting in approximately twenty additional hours of taped material. In general, as did the correctors, listeners found this an engaging task. They talked to me enthusiastically about what they could infer from the recordings. Often they reported viscerally liking or disliking a recorded speaker. Listeners would say, “She makes me mad,” “She bores me,” “She makes me crack up.” Some listeners would themselves start to tell a similar story that had happened to them, or describe at length how they were similar to or different from the recorded speaker. Sometimes a recorded speaker would remind a listener of someone she knew. Listeners would often deliver their commentaries by spontaneously reperforming the recorded story, to show me how a speaker created a particular impression. One listener, for example reported after hearing Isabel in French, “She annoys me. I lived in the suburbs for three–four years and it’s true that I couldn’t have a discussion with a young person without him saying, ‘Fuck. Stressed me out, I would a smashed their mugs/kicked their asses.’ And with her it’s the same style.” For this listener, the recorded speaker reminded her of a “type” she recognized, could enact in quotation, while commenting critically on that type. Listeners’ remarks thus provided not only neutral descriptions, but also another level of vivid metapragmatically and pragmatically rich performances in their own right, of and about the original speakers. Clearly, these recordings were

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extremely evocative for listeners of personas from their own similar social worlds. We will now examine the patterns in how listeners responded to the questions above, to see how they perceived the personas and contexts the original speakers summoned up in their two languages. Consistent Differences Listeners Heard in French versus Portuguese Versions of a Story Listeners consistently commented on the different images of speakers, characters, and contexts summoned up in French as opposed to Portuguese tellings. Plot Listeners typically had little to say about the plot differences between French and Portuguese tellings. One listener said, “The content, there are many things that are the same, but it’s different, totally different.” What listeners compared at length was not the different referential content of French and Portuguese versions of a story, but differences in the indexes of attitudes, affect, and identity. We turn now to examine the systematic differences in how listeners imagined the specific social universe evoked in the stories—the personas of the speaker and their associated manners of speaking, and those of other characters. Perceptions of Ways of Speaking As the only cues that listeners had about speakers were verbal (from audio-recordings), listeners’ perceptions of speakers are intrinsically linked to their perceptions of speech itself. However, although listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s identity and her speech are tightly linked, listeners varied in the extent to which they saw their perceptions as linguistically mediated. Comments about how listeners perceived a speaker were indeed sometimes explicitly metalinguistic—the speaker is vulgar, because her speech is vulgar. However, sometimes listeners had such an overpowering impression of a speaker, that the listener saw no need to mention what aspect of speech contributed to this impression. In such instances, listeners made a particularly strong iconic linkage between the speakers’ manner of speaking and character. Therefore, although answers to questions about a recorded speaker’s language use and persona might seem to repeat each other, because of this variability in how people linked language and persona perception, I asked listeners to comment separately on how people spoke and on what kind of person they seemed to be. Listeners appealed to different criteria when evaluating speakers’ language use in French and Portuguese, similarly to what I had noticed for correctors. As we saw for the correctors, in Portuguese they listened for nonstandard influences both from within Portugal (markers of region, rurality/urbanity, social

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class, generation) and from French, both potential sources of stigma. Listeners were very concerned about how standard or “correct” speakers’ Portuguese speech was. They were also concerned with where the speaker and her family were from within Portugal,7 commenting on speakers’ region and whether they were audibly from the countryside or a more urban area. Typically, listeners decided that speakers were from the north, commenting on their uses of /b/ or /v/, and their pronunciation of syllable final /s/, well-known markers of regional origin (Cunha and Cintra 1985). When listeners talked about speakers’ “mistakes,” they often hesitated over whether French or nonstandard rural Portuguese was the source. If the source was the latter, they were less condemning, even responding affectionately. For example, one listener first commented on a speaker’s repeated use of prontos, /prõtu∫/ with a final /∫/ (a discourse particle roughly equivalent to “well”), instead of the more standard pronto /prõtu/. The listener first said that this usage indicated the speaker was an émigré, showing French influence, instead of a resident in Portugal using a colloquial form. Upon further reflection, she conceded that people “from over there” (full-time residents of Portugal) make the same “mistake,” thus making it more forgivable. If, however, listeners suspected that a “mistake” came from French, they were far less forgiving. The ultimate compliment from a listener was that the recorded speaker could “pass” as someone who had only ever lived in Portugal. Listeners also made more general assessments of how easily or fluently a speaker spoke Portuguese. Speed and spontaneity were also often commented upon. They would talk about this in terms of the speakers’ fluidity, lack of hesitation, or breadth of vocabulary. Even the harshest critics might still say, “but one can understand her,” or “she lands on her feet.” In this way, smoothness of performance, and intelligibility remained important criteria. Listeners made different types of remarks about speakers’ French. They never commented that a speaker’s French sounded nonnative or Portugueseinfluenced. This confirms earlier discussions that most LDs perceive themselves and other LDs to be “native speakers” of French. However, instead of addressing the nativeness or legitimacy of listeners’ French as a sign of foreign or immigrant identity, listeners commented exclusively on speakers’ social location within France. Similar to what we saw for correctors, listeners all remarked on speakers’ youthfulness, social class, education, and their suburban versus Parisian origin. These different dimensions of identity are complexly linked. As Irvine (2001) argues, any single culturally defined style typically stands in relation to a larger set of styles from which it distinguishes itself. As I initially noticed with correctors, for LD listeners there is a continuum of verbally evokable identity categories that are interrelated—from “suburban” (banlieusard) to “young” (jeune) to “bourgeois.” Each ascription conjures up simultaneously generational, class, and geographically situated

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images of speakers. Banlieusard/“suburbanite” speech evokes the stereotyped image of a socially undesirable, rebellious, disrespectful youth on the fringes of urban French life, living in a housing project. Jeune is the intermediate and most positive ascription of the three, and means that the speaker is part of a socially constructed generational category (Morford 1997) or age cohort, and also, characterologically, is easygoing, nonhierarchical, and urban. Bourgeois speech is associated with hierarchy, formality, elitism, and stuffiness. These three descriptors are linked for people: Too much informal jeune speech can make the speaker sound “suburban.” Too much formal speech can make the speaker sound at best, mature and educated, or at worst, stiff, snobbish, pretentious, or bourgeois. Although listeners differed over the boundaries between the different categories, they all invoked the same identity categories and relations among them. For example, although listeners might diverge over the point at which the amount of profanity a speaker used would convert her from “young” to “suburban,” the categories themselves and the values associated with them were shared among the five listeners. The five listeners thus each invoked the same set of identity categories in which they classified speakers’ ways of talking and being. Perceptions of Register More specifically, in their comments about the original speakers’ language use, listeners noted the divergent “language levels” between speakers’ French and Portuguese tellings of a story. According to listeners, this divergence was of two kinds. First, listeners would characterize one telling as globally more familiar, formal, or vulgar than the other. Second, even if both versions struck a listener as of a comparable speech level (i.e. both familiar), the social images associated with each comparable level might still not be equivalent. Here I discuss both types of divergence. Perceptions of Register Divergence I asked listeners to generally characterize and compare the language levels of each telling. People regularly used four terms for characterizing language levels in both French and Portuguese: soutenu (formal), courant (everyday, unmarked usage), familier (familiar), and vulgaire/relâché (vulgar). As described above, because these four descriptors (soutenu, courant, familier, vulgaire) best captured participants’ understanding of language variation, these were the terms that I recycled when asking listeners to describe someone’s speech. What did these four descriptors mean to people and what images were associated with speech along this continuum of soutenu to vulgaire in each language? In both languages, courant indicates the most unmarked category, what listeners called “everyday talk,” “normal.” In French, as speech became more formal (soutenu) listeners might describe it positively as “cultivated” or

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the speech of someone who must be a “good student.” Someone might call the same speech, in negative terms, snobbish or pretentious. Listeners thus reacted to the same elements, but varied over whether the change was seen in a positive or negative light. This emerged in Ana’s story about Fafe in French. As her speech went from familiar to vulgar/relâché, listeners described Ana as “young,” in positive terms, and as “suburban,” aggressive, and delinquent, in negative terms. In negative or positive lights, her speech was heard as sounding like that of a teenager from a suburban housing project, assertive (qui s’affirme) and as one who won’t be taken (qui ne se laisse pas faire), even aggressive. In Portuguese, listeners commented on a speaker’s shift to a lower register, it was typically to say that the speaker sounded rural and unschooled, from the village street. As speech became more “formal,” the listener might say that the speaker must be from a city, and was possibly a snob.8 Therefore Luso-descendants’ colloquial usage typically evokes an image of rurality and regional belonging in Portuguese, and tough, urban/suburban youth in French. Drawing from these comments, I then asked listeners to characterize the overall “language level” in a given story. Listeners often commented that speakers were markedly more familiar in one of the two versions, usually the French. Table 7.4 presents how each of the five listeners rated the language levels in all sixteen stories. C stands for courant, F for familier, S for soutenu, and V for vulgaire. The two rightmost columns provide this information, expressed in terms of percentage of listeners who rated each version as being in a particular register. As can be seen, listeners often saw the distinctions between registers as gradient, saying that the speaker was between two levels, for example, familier-courant or familier-vulgaire. A majority of listeners thought the speakers used a different language level in each language for five of the eight story pairs. Overall, one sees that listeners rated the speech of these speakers in each language as falling in differently sized ranges—where French was seen to span a much broader range of levels than Portuguese. Most of the Portuguese was evaluated as being within the range between courant and familier. The French, on the other hand, was rated as having a much wider range of registers, from vulgaire all the way to soutenu.

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Table 7.4 Register ratings for story pairs in French and Portuguese by five listeners Number of Story Summary of listeners rating pair/speaker Listeners’ descriptions of two versions as language-level being in different registers P F 3 of 5 1. Teresa: 3C, 1 FC, 1F 1C, 1CF, phone booth 1CV, 1F, 1FV

5 of 5

2. Isabel: postal worker

4C, 1CF

1F, 2FV, 1VF, 1V

3 of 5

3.Linda: mother’s day

4CF, 1FC

1C,1CF, 1FC, 2F

1 of 5

4. Ana: Zouc

3C, 1CF, 1FC

4C,1CF

5 of 5

5.Ana: Fafe 2C, 2CF, 1FC

2S, 2CS, 1SF

1 of 5

6.Clara: metro time 7. Clara: aunt 8. Maria: laughter

5C

4C, 1CV

3C, 2CF

5C

3C, 1CF, 1FC

4C,1CF

2 of 5 3 of 5

Summary as percentages

P

F C = 60% C = 20% FC = 20% CF = 20% F = 20% CV = 20% F=20% FV = 20% C = 80% F = 20% CF = 20% FV = 40% VF = 20% F = 20% CF=80% C=20% F=20% CF=20% FC=20% F=40% C = 60% C = 80% CF = 20% CF = 20% FC = 20% C = 40% S = 40% CF = 40% CS = 40% FC = 20% SF = 20% C=100% C = 80% CV = 20% C = 60% C = 100% CF = 40% C = 60% C = 80% CF = 20% CF = 20% FC=20%

Perceptions of Register Nonequivalence As mentioned above, this comparison of registers only begins to tap into the non-equivalence of the social images and personas these bilinguals’ speech summons up. Therefore, although listeners and correctors used the same terms for language levels in both languages, the social locations associated with comparable levels were still quite different in both languages. The same language-level rating in each language does not conjure up the same image of the speaker to listeners. Thus, for example, even if the French le mec and Portuguese o gajo (roughly, “the guy”) strike listeners as both of familiar-vulgar usage, the evoked image of the person saying each still differs. Even where the language level was rated as the “same” in both

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languages, the social image associated with this speech was not equivalent. In French, one woman’s courant/familier speech sounded “young” or suburban. In Portuguese, it struck listeners as also courant/familier, but as rural-sounding, (de la campagne/from the country, d’un p’tit bled/from the boonies, or un portugais de village/a village Portuguese). The courant/familier Portuguese of the speaker of story four, although courant/familier, was also described as sounding like a peasant (paysan) with an accent that smacks of the soil (un accent du terroir), that she sounds like le peuple, translated somewhat negatively as “the common people.”9 The French courant/familier of the same speaker struck the listener as sounding jeune and from Paris or the suburbs. Therefore, even if speech was familiar in French and Portuguese, listeners might still form a very different image of the speaker, situated in a different cultural context. From listeners’ discussions of recorded speakers’ speech, one sees the salient categories through which listeners situate speakers as particular types of French and Portuguese speakers and social actors in French and Portuguese space. Speaker Perception As mentioned above, listeners sometimes treated their perceptions of speech itself as a somewhat different issue from their overall perception of the speaker as a person. How did listeners relate discussions of bilinguals’ ways of speaking with discussions of bilinguals’ identities? Irvine and Gal (2000) discuss the semiotic processes of recursivity, through which people may project meanings from one domain, such as speech style, to another domain, such as group characteristics. In my study, Irvine and Gal’s approach allows one to appreciate how listeners link manner of speaking and persona. To find out how listeners perceived speakers’ personas in each language, I asked them to tell me how they imagined the speaker more generally. In all eight of the story pairs, a majority of the listeners (at least three of five) perceived all six of the original speakers to display different attitudes, or even to seem like a different person in French and Portuguese. This supports findings in chapters 4–6 (differences that the speakers themselves reported, and the different discourse patterns documented in chapter 6). The differences that the speakers themselves reported and that were found in their discursive patterns are also manifest in how these bilinguals are perceived by others. Listeners talked about this displayed difference in particular ways that paralleled how the speakers themselves talked about the differences in chapter 4. Like speakers, listeners varied in “where” they situated the difference. Sometimes listeners would remark that the speaker had a different “voice.” Some would talk about this in terms of the speaker having a “difference in personality.” Rather than invoke the explicitly psychological construct of personality,

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some listeners would simply say that the listener seemed like a different person, “I feel like she’s a different person” (Irene about Linda). “I don’t really see the same person” (Armanda about Teresa). Joana reported, “I feel like I’m dealing with two different girls; one who knows how to behave herself, and one not. From her language it seems like she’s from two completely different backgrounds. I can’t get over it. I didn’t think she was like that.” Because of the difference in how another listener saw Isabel in each version, she could not reconcile how those two images could come from the same person. Sometimes, however, listeners would imply that they heard a different dimension of the same person: “She shows herself under two different angles” (Irene about Linda), or “She gives two different images of herself” (Irene about Clara). Although a majority of listeners had a different impression of the speaker in each language, listeners gave different interpretations of the nature of the difference that they heard. What were some of the types of differences that listeners typically commented on? For four out of eight story pairs, some listeners commented that speakers seemed more “aggressive” in their French guises than in Portuguese. When listeners saw this positively, they would describe this as speakers’ better ability to stand up for themselves (se défend, n’se laisse pas faire), or assert themselves.10 When described negatively, listeners talked about a speaker seeming like a rebel who is less polite and respectful, talks back, is hostile, aggressive, pushy or provocative. “She’s more aggressive . . . more feisty” (Irene about Teresa). “She answers back . . . she’s less calm . . . angry, more dynamic. She defends herself better . . . she was less polite” (Armanda about Teresa). “She’s angrier . . . more aggressive . . . meaner” (Armanda about Isabel). “She’s got a lot of nerve . . . impulsive . . . isn’t going to let herself be walked on.” “A girl who doesn’t let herself be walked on, but who looks for trouble at the same time . . . Even the tone of her voice is filled with vulgarity . . . provocation” (Irene about Linda). “She’s pushier” (Irene about Ana). Sometimes this would be coupled with a demographically situatable image that the speaker was a teenager from the suburbs of Paris: “Northern suburbs of Paris . . . because of her language . . . all these words make me put her in that category . . . She’s got character . . . She represents well teenagers in the suburbs”(Joana about Isabel). Note how this listener conflates her sense of the speaker’s geographic origin (northern), a personality style (character), a lifestage and generation (teenager). Conversely, listeners commented that in Portuguese, the same speaker appeared calmer, more conciliatory, diplomatic, less provocative, held her tongue, avoided conflict, and kept control: “She knew how to keep control” (Joana about Teresa). “She let herself be insulted” (Irene about Teresa). “She tries to be diplomatic” (Vanessa about Teresa). “She’s nicer and more conciliatory” (Irene about Isabel) “She’s patient, peaceful . . . rarely gets mad . . .

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calm . . . lets herself be walked on.” “She’s less vulgar . . . less provocative” (Irene about Linda). “We don’t hear her rebelliousness” (Joana about Linda). Listeners also revealed their perceptions of speakers when asked if they could imagine befriending speakers in each language. Although as a general rule, listeners did not consistently prefer speakers in French or Portuguese, for each story pair, listeners typically had a strong preference for the speaker in one language. That said, people gave consistent reasons for liking or disliking speakers in French and Portuguese. Reasons provided for disliking a speaker in Portuguese were that the speaker seemed too calm, serious, or somber. There were remarks that speakers just said too little in Portuguese (perhaps corresponding to the finding that stories tended to be shorter in Portuguese). One speaker admitted being put off by the rurality of a speaker’s accent in Portuguese. The reasons listeners provided for disliking a speaker in French were typically her use of “vulgar” vocabulary and hence her correspondingly excessive rebelliousness, anger or aggression (stories about mother’s day, postal worker, phone booth). When listeners diverged over the likeability of a particular speaker, the divergences were themselves noteworthy and revealed nevertheless shared interpretations of speech and character. For example, there was little consensus about how befriendable Isabel was (post office story) in the French version. Two people said they would not befriend her in French. They disliked her because of her “aggressiveness” and her “vocabulary.” Another listener, on the other hand, liked the speaker precisely because she “affirms herself.” “Aggressiveness” and “having character” or “standing up for oneself” are thus divergent interpretations of the same behavior. Although they reacted to the same dimensions of the speech, listeners had different thresholds for when too much of a (potentially) good thing (using verbal resources that are associated with assertiveness, but also hostility) became distasteful. Listeners also reacted strongly (positively and negatively) to the stance the speaker seemed to take on issues of gender or race (especially in the Zouc and the phone booth stories). In Portuguese, speakers were often perceived to be more passive with men and more racist towards nonwhites. Listeners were consistently more disturbed by how speakers invoked the race of male accosters in Portuguese tellings of stories (Zouc, phone booth). Listeners ascribed more prejudice to speakers when they described a character of Sub-Saharan African or West Indian descent as preto in Portuguese, but as noir, de couleur, or black in French. The Portuguese term evoked greater denigration. Similarly, how speakers talked about their interactions with men in general also elicited strong commentary. In response to Portuguese tellings about resisting male characters’ advances (Zouc, phone booth, metro time), listeners

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would sometimes comment on the speaker’s not having resisted or fought back assertively enough. In other words, listeners perceived speakers to have less progressive gender and racial attitudes in Portuguese, displaying stances listeners associated more with rural Portugal than with urban France. From these remarks, we see how listeners consistently saw speakers in French and Portuguese as different types of socially imaginable people. In French, speakers tended to be perceived as more aggressive/assertive; in Portuguese, as more reserved and passive. Perceptions of Affective Intensity I also sought to determine if listeners perceived speakers as displaying greater or lesser affective intensity in either language. I therefore asked listeners to tell me whether the speaker was more involved or “into” either telling. Indeed other scholars have reported that bilinguals often appear to be more affectively distant in their second language (see Pavlenko and Dewaele 2003; Pavlenko 2006a, 2006b; Dewaele 2006), although childhood bilinguals, such as LDs, may not display this difference (see Harris, Ayçiçegi, and Gleason 2003; Harris, Gleason, and Ayçiçegi 2006). In fact, listeners as a rule did not perceive speakers to be consistently more involved in French or Portuguese tellings.11 According to listeners, in some instances speakers displayed more affect in Portuguese tellings, whereas some displayed more affect in French tellings, and some displayed affect of equivalent intensity in both tellings. In three of eight story pairs, a majority [at least three of five] of listeners felt that the speaker was more involved in the French telling. In one story pair there was strong consensus that the speaker was more involved in Portuguese. In four of the eight tellings, at least half of the listeners thought the speaker was equally involved in both tellings, though perhaps in different ways. From these results, shown in table 7.5, there is thus no overwhelming consensus that stories told in French were perceived as more involved.12 Therefore listeners’ perceptions that speakers are different in their two languages are not simply a matter of the speaker seeming more engaged in either language, but seem more to be a matter of speakers’ having performed different personas. Perceptions of Others Listeners commented not only on how they perceived the speakers, but on how they imagined other characters in speakers’ stories. In general, listeners imagined third-person characters as locally recognizable French or Portuguese “types,” corresponding to the language in which the story was told. Often the listener would comment that she knew or had encountered, and could herself easily imagine, people like the narrated and enacted characters. One recurrent “type” that listeners recognized was that of the older female kinswoman. In three story pairs, a protective and/or interfering mother, aunt, or cousin plays a prominent role (aunt, Fafe, mother’s day). Listeners typically

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described these characters as Portuguese types: backward, old-fashioned, busybodies. Listeners tended to react more strongly to these characters in the Portuguese versions of stories, reporting that they could more easily imagine them in Portuguese. The performed characters therefore more effectively evoked shared stereotypes in Portuguese tellings. Table 7.5 Perceptions of affective intensity in French versus Portuguese: “In which language was the speaker more involved?” Story

More involved in Portuguese

More involved in French

Equally involved

1. Teresa: phone booth (LOE* F) 2. Isabel: postal worker (LOE P) 3. Linda: mother’s day (LOE both) 4. Ana: Zouc (LOE F) 5. Ana: Fafe (LOE P) 6. Clara: metro time (LOE F) 7. Clara-aunt (LOE P) 8. Maria: laughter (LOE F)

0

2

2

At least 3 of 5 report more involved as Both

0

5

0

French

0

4

1

French

2

0

3

Both

2

0

3

Both

1

3

0

French

1

1

3

Both

4

0

0

Portuguese

Note: *LOE denotes language of experience, or the original language in which the narrated event can be assumed to have transpired. When a row does not sum to five, this means that at least one listener did not answer the question for that story.

As one listener said about the male character in the Portuguese version of Fafe, “I see the kind of guy. I can imagine him physically . . . stereotype of the poor little country boy.” “The village idiot” (Armanda about Fafe). “There are guys like this in village festivals, there are lots, there are tons” (Joana about Fafe). Similarly, in the Portuguese version of the phone booth story, several heard a familiar social type: “The Portuguese [men] have this ease of insulting girls . . . hicks . . . with no upbringing . . . who drink too much . . . Portuguese men . . . they’re such pains in the ass . . . I don’t understand the men,

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especially . . . no respect, y’know, for women” (Rita about the phone booth male character). About the same character in French, listeners resituated him as incarnating French stereotypes in a French social landscape. Vanessa said, “I saw him as younger and more aggressive.” “We feel his vulgarity more . . . He’s a hood from the projects . . . must have been in the suburbs” (Joana). Joana also made the following remark about the male accoster in French in the metro time story, “She [the speaker] wants to pass him off as a delinquent, a pain in the ass . . . little vulgar kid who says tu to everyone . . . with no respect . . . a kid from the suburbs . . . who doesn’t do shit in school.” From these remarks, we see that the character-types in French and Portuguese evoke recognizable images of others that are context specific. 13 As listeners perceived speakers to be more racist in Portuguese (described above), they also perceived racially stereotyped characters in different ways in French and Portuguese. More specifically, listeners perceived characters of male accosters through the lens of French or Portuguese racial stereotypes, depending on the language in which they heard the story. In phone booth story the speaker reported being accosted by a man who was preto in Portuguese (roughly equivalent to “colored”), and de couleur in French (roughly equivalent to “of color”). One listener reported that she indeed had a different image of the character in the two versions and, for this reason, had difficulty deciding where this event had originally happened. She deliberated over how she could most credibly imagine the male character—as French or Portuguese. She ultimately decided that, based on her different images, the French version seemed more credible because the character fit better with her French stereotypes of a male racialized minority. The character seemed more aggressive in French, which fit her stereotype better. In Portugal . . . people of color . . . I don’t see them as as aggressive . . . but here where they get carried away more easily . . . there they remain discreet, you know . . . while here, each time there’s a problem . . . they’re involved. They aren’t discrete. There are many problems with them here in France— more than there.

Joana’s highly racially charged comments themselves deserve attention and reveal much about the listener’s attitudes. However, here they demonstrate how language-dependent French and Portuguese images of the character were in the story. Together, these perceptions of third-person characters in each language demonstrate how evocative of local “types” (or “stereotypes”) the stories were for listeners from a similar background.

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Conclusion To summarize the consistent trends of the differences listeners consistently heard in French and Portuguese tellings, listeners responded to speakers’ voicings of self and other. That is, listeners relied on and responded to indexical cues in speakers’ stories to summon up familiar “types” of people and interactions in their perceptions of the speakers’ ways of talking, of the speaker as a person, of her affective intensity, of other characters, and the general context of the stories. We have thus seen in this chapter what listener reactions reveal about the “meaning” of French and Portuguese stories. We examined the patterns of what listeners heard differently in French and Portuguese, asking how representative these story pairs are of the larger corpus. By appealing to listener reactions in this way, one has a better sense of what French and Portuguese ways of speaking index for bilinguals—how forms of language and identity are intertwined for them. Overall, one sees how listeners perceived speakers to embody different styles of persona related to their different use of language variation in French and Portuguese. Listeners consistently heard speakers as different types of people, using nonequivalent styles of speaking— where ways of speaking and persona become indexically and iconically linked. This chapter has explored links between these socially indexical discursive forms and the experiences of identity that they evoke for listeners. Within local ideologies that link ways of speaking to socially locatable stereotypes of kinds of people, adopting a particular way of speaking makes the speaker come to life as a particular kind of person. When I asked listeners to tell me how they pictured recorded speakers and the characters in their stories, they consistently perceived these bilinguals’ verbally performed identities as different in French and Portuguese. Listeners regularly reported that they experienced the speakers as not quite the same person in each language. These differences were described both in terms of the speaker’s social location and their character or “personality.” In terms of social location, in Portuguese, speakers and their characters were imagined primarily to be rural, or émigré character, whereas in French they were imagined to be young, suburban hoodlums, or urban snobs. Speakers were then also described as having character or personality styles associated with these different locations—more passive and maybe backward-thinking in Portuguese, more aggressive or assertive in French. We as analysts may not take these materials at face value to determine objectively if speakers really are more passive or aggressive in one language or the other. Rather, we should remark on the ways that listeners connected particular ways of speaking with social locations, and with ways of being. Thus, we see how listeners’ comments link ethnosociolinguistics and ethnopsychology. These reactive materials reveal the social psychological effects that the performance of these different language levels may have on the

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experience of these verbally performed identities. Listeners’ reactions thus indicate that by using locally meaningful ways of speaking, the speaker had evoked for them nonequivalent, but equally compelling, authentic-seeming, culturally imaginable speaking personas in both languages. This chapter has also shown, from listeners’ perspectives, how powerfully speech evokes persona and context. That listeners reported that they felt they “knew” and could vividly imagine speakers, after hearing only brief recordings, demonstrates this. These reactions show the subjective experience of language use to both speakers and listeners and the power of linguistically indexical forms to evoke and invoke that experience.14 With the material presented here, we see a strong convergence between speakers’ and listeners’ reported experience of identity in two languages, as well as how those experiences relate to speakers’ actual patterns of speaking. What does this convergence reveal more generally about the relationships between language forms and the experience of identity? I have argued that the experience of identity, for these listeners, is semiotically mediated—here, by the use of indexically pregnant language forms. However, analysts and participants may differ in their understandings of the causal links between language and self. Following Irvine and Gal (2000), what the analyst sees as indexical mediation, participants may experience iconically—people talk in a way that mirrors how they “naturally” are, characterologically (their “personality”), sociologically (where they’re from), and affectively (their “feelings”). As scholars of linguistic ideology have argued, one cannot discount participants’ understandings of talk, as these may themselves inform people’s behavior. The relationship between the forms and subjective beliefs and experiences that they mediate may thus be reciprocal—one of both cause and effect. As effect: In one sense, these experienced personas are socially indexical entailments (Silverstein 1976/1995) of adopting these different ways of speaking. That is, use of the forms may instantiate certain predictable effects (making a speaker sound aggressive). Speakers do not need to intend these effects (to seem a particular way) in order to create the sense for speakers and listeners that particular identities have been performed. As cause: However, speakers may actively (if not fully consciously) use certain forms with certain effects in mind. For example, a speaker may think only in terms of sounding “tough,” without strategizing concretely about which linguistic forms will make her sound “tough.” The verbal resources through which “toughness” is accomplished may not be the focus of participants’ attention. People may have variable degrees of awareness of the relationships between talk and identity, for themselves and for others. At moments, speakers may be aware of making strategic verbal choices to create a particular effect or to seem a certain way (refined, rebellious, et cetera). At other moments they may act as if their speech just is—transparently, unselfconsciously reflecting their “natural” self. Further-

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more, listeners and speakers may diverge widely about why a speaker is talking in a certain way. What seems unselfconscious to one participant might seem forced or contrived to others in the same conversation.15 What we have seen in this chapter is the value of attending to both the forms and to participants’ experiences of those forms, to fully understand how they are semiotically linked. Thus far, we have examined three sources of data—bilinguals’ selfreports, an empirical account of the discourse patterns through which they display who they are in their two languages, and finally, a discussion of how others perceive them through their narratives. It is unusual to be able to combine multiple accounts of the same phenomenon to this extent. However, with these three perspectives, we have addressed trends from a larger sample, with relatively little attention to how this plays out for any individual speaker. In chapters 8 and 9, we will see how the patterns discussed thus far play out for two individual bilingual women. 1

My study thus differs from the classic matched-guise test in several important ways. Matched -guise participants are asked to infer aspects of the recorded speakers’ identity, as a way to study their language attitudes, and correlate those with demographic variables, such as ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Typically, in this technique, judges react to samples that have been preselected to be comparable—to “say the same thing” referentially in multiple languages, styles, or accents. In my study, the very question the listeners address is whether indeed the original speakers spontaneously said “the same thing” at all in their two languages. My focus therefore remains more on the original taped speakers than on the listeners. It was for listeners to determine the similarity or difference between French and Portuguese tellings. 2 Full transcriptions and codings of these stories may be obtained by contacting the author. 3 In chapters 8 and 9, we will closely examine listener reactions to particular stories from individual speakers. 4 Recall that speaker role inhabitance reveals the dominant perspectives from which narratives are told. 5 Below, we see the proportions of each role for each story pair. These stories show similar trends to the larger sample, with more narration in Portuguese, and more interlocutory stance in French. Table 7.6 Speaker role inhabitance in eight stories listeners heard Story 1. Teresa: phone booth 2. Isabel: postal worker

Version F

Narrator 37

Interlocutor 37

Character 46

P F

49 25

31 46

42 41

P

52

42

39

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3.Linda: mother’s day 4. Ana: Zouc 5.Ana: Fafe 6. Clara: metro time 7.Clara: aunt 8. Maria: laughter

F

39

59

26

P F

51 47

55 45

25 29

P F

54 42

43 57

34 27

P F

33 29

43 54

43 38

P F

50 39

78 74

0 13

P F

48 58

71 61

7 8

P

60

52

20

Like the larger corpus, six of the eight stories show the same trend of greater use of interlocutory familiar speech in French. The phone booth and the aunt makeup stories are notable exceptions. 6 Given the selective limits and constraints on metapragmatic awareness (Silverstein 1981), neither speakers nor listeners can freely assess how specific discursive devices contribute to the pragmatic effects of a story. Therefore, although I did ask these judges to tell me what made speakers seem a particular way, one should not take participants’ explanations for the functions of different linguistic forms at face value. However, participants’ general assessments of the global effects of such performances do yield insight into the overall impact of a particular narrative performance. 7 Instead of saying that a speaker sounded like a particular kind of speaker in Portuguese, some said a speaker sounded like a specific person they knew, located in Portugal, such as, “That's how my aunt sounds.” 8 On the rare occasion that someone would sound “young,” urban, and familiar, listeners would praise that. 9 Only two speakers (the teller of story number 1, and the teller of 6 and 7) were described as from the city, or even snobbish. It so happens that these speakers come from regions relatively near the western coast of Portugal, near the capital. 10 As mentioned above, in three of eight cases (phone booth, postal worker, and mother's day), a majority of listeners thought that the speaker came across as more aggressive in the French telling. In a fourth story (zouc), two of five listeners spontaneously reported this. In those cases, speakers use more familiar and/or vulgar speech in the interlocutory and first-person character frame, as formally coded. Listeners respond even more dramatically to familiar or vulgar speech in the first-person character frame, as that is the frame in which speakers enact their own characters. Interestingly, listeners only seem to react to the speech levels most directly in the speakers’ mouths (interlocutory and C1). Vulgar speech, for instance, in a thirdperson character’s mouth did not tend to affect how listeners perceived the speech level of the story overall. So, for example, although the Portuguese version of the phone booth story has a

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third-person character speak obscenities, listeners do not seem to hold the speaker responsible for these. 11 Perceptions of greater involvement were closely linked to the relative proportions of role occupancies. In six of eight story pairs, the version with a smaller percentage of narrator speech was rated by at least half the listeners as more involved. 12 When speakers seemed impliqué/involved to listeners, it was described in the following ways. Some reported that the speaker really showed how she felt—whether anger or sadness or tension. Some reported that the speaker might still seem upset about the narrated event—that there is a continuity between her then-and there and here-and-now reactions. For example, they might say, this is still a bad memory for this person, that she’s still angry, and “won't forget” what happened. “It hurts her and it always will,” “It's not digested.” “It's still very alive for her,” “It's still fresh.” Some commented that a speaker was really “in” the telling, even if she didn't re-experience exactly what she might have originally felt. “She puts herself at the moment of the story.” Some commented on how the speaker created a feeling of involvement through quotation. “She redoes the dialogue.” “She takes the voice of the people.” “She speaks as if the person were directly in front of her.” Some focused more on the effect an involved story would produce for the listener: “She gets us to see what happened.” One listener said she felt as if she were really “with” the characters, listening to them in their house. Some talked about the way an involved story would conjure up the narrated context. “We feel the climate of nervous tension in her family,” “She uses the right words to give us the right ambiance,” “It's more visual.” Some talked about how the speaker’s language usage created a more involved sensation, because it's more familiar, that the speaker uses “coarse words—that she's really got it in her belly.” When listeners would comment on someone's lesser involvement, they might say that the speaker is “no longer in the story,” or that she tells it with detachment or distance, that her tone is neutral or monotonous, that she only gives the facts, as if it were about someone else. An intermediate stance speakers would describe, between involved and detached, is when the speaker tells a serious story in a lighthearted tone. As one listener said, a speaker told her story in that way that one’s grandparents might describe a distant, bad experience. They make it “lighter,” or “dedramatize” it. A story where one might imagine the original speaker would have been terrified becomes a funny story, where she “cracks up” when telling it. Some commented on the way a speaker would show her judgment of what she narrated, perhaps by quoting a character in a way that made them seem particularly ridiculous, which was “showing what she thinks,” “giving her opinion.” Involved stories might be cases where the speaker “emits a judgment,” “puts herself in the place of the characters, saying the exact words that the character said,” or “shows her reaction.” With these different ways of explaining involvement, one sees some correlations with scholars’ discussions of evaluation/voicing/footing, as understood in vernacular terms. 13 Whereas as a whole, Portuguese and French third-person characters are not perceived as more or less aggressive in either language, though often rendered as locally stereotyped in each, those third-person characters who are presented as speaking with a greater percentage of more familiar or vulgar speech are perceived by listeners as more aggressive or harsh by a majority of listeners, in six of seven cases. In other words, where one version has a higher proportion of familiar or vulgar third-person character speech, that is the version in which the listeners thought the character came across in a more negative light; the way in which a character speaks is taken by the listeners as an icon of that character’s negative qualities. 14 In future work, I envision use of listener reaction techniques by different kinds of socially situated French and Portuguese monolinguals. It would be of interest to see how different kinds of monolinguals evaluate these speakers.

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15

It would indeed be very interesting to know speakers’ reactions to listeners’ perceptions of them.

PART III INDIVIDUAL SPEAKER PROFILES

CHAPTER 8 TERESA

In the preceding four chapters, trends from a sample of twenty-three women have been addressed, with little attention to how those trends played out for any individual speaker. In discussions of how speakers from the larger sample are different in French and Portuguese, the relationships between the phenomena in each part of the study (narrative patterns, self-reports, and others’ perceptions) were only related on a group level. Consequently, it was difficult to appreciate how the three sources of data are linked for specific participants. A focus on individual speakers allows us to attend to elements of individual creativity relative to larger shared practices. Sapir (1993) argued against erasing the individual or the variability of individual experience in analyses of cultural patterns. Similarly, Johnstone (1996) has argued that one should be mindful not to reduce individual speakers to mere representatives of larger demographic groups. With this perspective in mind, in chapters eight and nine, I show how the aggregate patterns discussed in preceding chapters come to life in culturally patterned, yet complexly unique ways for two individual bilingual women, Teresa and Isabel. This will allow us to see more coherently the complex ways in which a bilingual can seem to be a “different person” in her two languages: how biographical contexts, formally identifiable ways of speaking, self-experience, and impressions created for others are closely intertwined. We will thus better see how specific people use, experience, and are seen through the resources and contexts of their two languages. This chapter’s organization parallels that used in chapters about materials for the larger sample, but ties together the results from the multiple methods around an individual speaker. Relevant biographical information is provided about Teresa’s life experiences, attitudes, and aspirations in French and Portuguese linguistic and cultural contexts. Subsequently, presented is an example of a story pair that she told of the same event in both languages. The story pair provides an in-depth empirical, real-time illustration of how Teresa presents herself in each language through the use of specific indexical strategies of voicing. Her story pair is analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, as I look at the strategies through which Teresa performs here-and-now and thereand-then personas in French and Portuguese. Although I examine similar features to those discussed for the larger sample, in this chapter more attention is

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devoted to synthetic, qualitative analysis of the text of the narratives. Following this discussion of narrative form is a discussion of how Teresa explicitly says she feels when speaking each language, in general and in the context of the interview. We will see here the multiple ways in which Teresa understands the pragmatic effects of speaking two languages on her experiences of self and context. Finally, to flesh out further what these stories “mean” within Teresa’s sociolinguistic worlds, we then turn to listeners’ reactions to and interpretations of the story pairs—what type of persons they imagined Teresa to be in French and in Portuguese. Therefore, as with the larger sample, three different approaches are used in our analysis of Teresa’s presentations of self. These approaches together draw from four different types of speech events: 1. The original narrated event, upon which the two tellings of the narrative are based (only the speaker herself has direct access to that particular event) 2. Teresa’s tellings of that event in two languages 3. Teresa’s reports to me of her experiences of the two tellings 4. Listeners’ reports of their impressions of each telling These multiple levels give us insight into the relationships between patterns of discourse and participants’ experience of those patterns. In particular, we will see how speakers and listeners creatively infer images of persons, feelings, and contexts from such patterns. From this link between use and experience, we can then better see what it means to say that Teresa is “not the same person” in French and Portuguese. Because it would be hasty to claim to have identified Teresa’s definitive styles of self-presentation in both languages based on only one story, I will then establish the relationship between the analyzed story pair and her larger corpus of story pairs. This will demonstrate how representative that one pair was of her larger narrative corpus. In sum, we will thus have multiple lenses through which to consider how Teresa is “different” in two languages. This will allow us to address the larger questions of this book, attending to how such issues manifest for a particular social actor. Teresa’s Background Teresa was born in France of Portuguese parents from the central, western region of Pombal. She is the second-born of two children. Her brother was born in Portugal and accompanied his parents to France, whereas Teresa was born in France. When we met, Teresa was a twenty-four-year-old university student studying for an advanced degree in Portuguese and Spanish. I came to know Teresa quite well, and spent time with her in a variety of informal and formal contexts and situations in both France and Portugal.

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The socioeconomic and sociolinguistic background of Teresa’s parents forms the backdrop against which Teresa has had to define herself. Both of Teresa’s parents come from humble social origins, with minimal formal education. They grew up on small family-owned farms. Her father attended school only through the fourth grade. He is a construction worker in France, where 80% of his colleagues are also Portuguese. Her mother never attended school, as she was the oldest of seven children, with many responsibilities. She started working at the age of nine. Teresa’s mother has only recently learned to read Portuguese through private instruction, but does not read French. In France, she works as a maid. Unlike many first generation migrants, Teresa’s parents are not sure if they want to move back to Portugal permanently, even after retirement. Teresa does not consider the Portuguese and French her parents speak to be entirely legitimate. She is less critical of her parents’ mastery of French than she is of their Portuguese. According to Teresa, her parents speak French “not too badly, but with a very pronounced accent.” On the other hand, to her ears, their Portuguese has been contaminated with rurally marked regionalisms and French. As part of Teresa’s own efforts to speak standard French and Portuguese, she condemns and distances herself from her parents’ language mixing. She especially disparages their public use of inadvertent Frenchified Portuguese. According to Teresa, her parents don’t realize when they mix French into Portuguese, for example, asking in frantuguês/emigrês for ridos (curtains) or carotas (carrots) in Portugal, instead of the standard Portuguese cortinas and cenouras. “In the family, it’s okay. At work, it makes you seem stupid.” She knows that this kind of speech could be the subject of ridicule. Teresa indicates that she uses gentle teasing to correct them. “We [the Lusodescendant children] take it jokingly, and then we say, ‘It’s not like that, what are you talking about,’ we correct . . . She [her mother] takes it very well . . . I say, ‘Well, look,’ and then we make fun.” The Portuguese and French spoken by her parents mark their trajectories of rural poverty to emigré in Portuguese, and urban working-class immigrant in France. Their experiences are part of the cultural and sociolinguistic heritage that Teresa must rework and try to transcend in her own life. Both Teresa and her brother have grown up bilingual. Teresa has no memory of learning either language, and has the impression that she has always spoken both. Although Teresa has grown up and been educated in France, Portuguese has remained an active language for her at home, in her studies, and in Portugal. Both languages have continued to play important roles in her life. Portuguese has remained the language spoken at home, studied throughout school and university, the language of family and friends in Portugal revisited every summer, and a language she has used in professional contexts in France and Portugal. French is the language she uses with the

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outside world in France (in school and in public) and with many of her peers, including her boyfriend. I elaborate some of these contexts below. Portuguese has remained Teresa’s home language. Unlike some Luso-descendants who respond to their parents’ Portuguese in French (de Villanova 1987), both Teresa and her brother have always spoken Portuguese to their parents. At her maternal grandfather’s insistence, her parents always wanted them to maintain their Portuguese. “My grandfather always told her, ‘Okay, go make a life for yourselves in France if you want, but make me happy so that my grandchildren can talk to me.’” In recent years, however, French has been increasingly present in Teresa’s home life. Teresa recently moved in with a French boyfriend who does not speak Portuguese. In order not to exclude him, she and her family try to speak French around him. To be a good bilingual, Teresa believes she and other LDs should approximate monolingual versions of both languages that should allow them to function in and travel easily between equivalent monolingual contexts in France and Portugal. Teresa herself tries very hard to keep the two languages separate. She believes that LDs are in a better position to do this than are their parents. For Teresa, it’s shameful when Luso-descendants don’t speak “their” language, or when they speak it “badly.” She blames both them and their parents for not having made the effort. To illustrate this, she tells a story of a LD who had not learned Portuguese and wanted to move to Portugal as a young adult. “It’s really stupid not to speak Portuguese. The proof is that now she’s bothered because she wants to go there now . . . and she’s in trouble . . . that’s when we realize it’s an asset. Me, when I go to Portugal, I have no problem asking for this or that.” Unlike the other members of her family, Teresa has formally studied standard Portuguese throughout her school years, within the French educational system and through private lessons, and is considered the family’s expert. She is frequently asked by her parents and brother how to spell, say, and write Portuguese “correctly.” For example, when her brother was drafting wedding invitations, Teresa was asked to check the wording and spelling of the Portuguese text. Like many Luso-descendants, Teresa has experienced and is aware of her social mobility relative to her family. In particular, she is conscious of the role that mastery of standard French and Portuguese has played in her improved social status in both French and Portuguese societies. Her older brother was educated in France, but was discouraged from going to university. Teresa, on the other hand, has excelled in the French educational system through her mastery of both languages. She credits her high score on the Portuguese portion of the baccalauréat with helping her to pass the overall exam, demonstrating how success in Portuguese can be used to secure French symbolic capital. The university degree that she is currently completing in Spanish and Portuguese has required five years of university study. She directly links her

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professional ambitions with her need to speak standard Portuguese. “I’ve always wanted to work with . . . Portugal . . . So I absolutely have to master Portuguese well.” More specifically, for Teresa, speaking a language “well” means first and foremost knowing the “rules” of formal, written grammar. Ideally, she would know these equally well in both languages. However, she admits that she masters such explicit standard norms better in French than in Portuguese. In Portuguese, she fears that, despite her fluency, her less complete knowledge of standard Portuguese norms may hinder her from speaking “well.” Therefore, although her parents speak Portuguese fluently, their lack of formal study necessarily prevents them from speaking their native language “well.” She even envies and admires French people who study Portuguese with no “corrupting” exposure to everyday usage, despite their lesser fluency. French people who learn Portuguese, they do better in grammar than Luso-descendants, because they learn it, they know it well . . . so we are a little . . . at an advantage because we know the language, but in the end, no, because when it’s a question of writing, we’re a little ill at ease and we don’t know the grammar rules . . . Once you know the grammar rule, you apply it. And us, since we don’t know it, it’s intuitive and it works one out of two times. That’s the problem.

However, although she is the family’s most standard speaker, she admits to not feeling completely at ease in all Portuguese-speaking situations. She feels most comfortable speaking Portuguese in intimate settings, with people whom she knows well, who will not judge her Portuguese or her. In particular, Teresa does not feel comfortable with more public registers of honorifics in Portuguese, such as the titles used to address teachers, engineers, politicians, and anyone with a university degree. This discomfort comes both from her linguistic insecurity about using such forms appropriately, as well as from her distaste for the elitism she sees them as encoding. As she puts it, “I think that’s dumb, you don’t have that in France.” These ways of speaking seem excessively hierarchical and non-egalitarian to her.1 Because Teresa has very actively striven to cultivate a “Portuguese” life and identity in the context of urban and suburban France, she routinely uses Portuguese outside her immediate family in France. As the secretary general of an LD association in Paris, she is called upon to speak Portuguese with strangers in formal situations, appealing for support to officials from the Portuguese embassy and universities. Teresa also has many Luso-descendant friends with whom she speaks some Portuguese. As she puts it, with other LDs, she speaks 70% of the time in French, 30% in Portuguese. Indeed, from my time spent with Teresa in these settings, this seems fairly true.

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Teresa has also had to speak Portuguese in monolingual Portuguese contexts in Portugal. Teresa has spent a good deal of time in Portugal, both in her family’s village and in more urban settings. She and her family have spent every summer in her mother’s village of origin. Her parents as well as many of her mothers’ émigré siblings have built large vacation homes. Teresa spends time both with other family members who are returning émigrés, as well as with family (aunts, uncles, and cousins) who have always resided in Portugal. With them, she prefers to speak only Portuguese. Similarly, she has also used Portuguese in more formal, professional settings in Portugal. In the context of her university studies, she completed a summer internship in urban Portugal, doing office work. She credits that experience with teaching her “good” Portuguese, cleansing her speech of emigrês and ruralisms and replacing them with urban standard. This allowed her to adopt a style of talking closer to what she perceives nonmigrants to have, giving her greater confidence. When you have internships in Portugal, that’s when you realize that even though you have ten years of Portuguese classes behind you, you don’t have the thing . . . Little by little on the phone . . . That’s the best experience . . . There are even people who told me, “Hey, that’s it. You’ve got the [right] accent.” Because us [LDs] in Portugal, given our accent, people realize right away that we’re not [living] over there . . . It’s not the accent from over there . . . After my internship, so I went home on the weekends [to her family’s Portuguese village], and there’s a cousin who said to me, “Hey, that’s it . . . You’ve got the Portuguese accent.”

As one can see, she consistently distinguishes between the Portuguese that she had always spoken and the idealized Portuguese from “over there” of “Portuguese people,” which she associates with formal professional contexts. Both languages also figure into her plans for the future to live and work in France. She hopes to stay with her French boyfriend and raise a family with him in France, but plans to speak Portuguese to her children. Teresa also explicitly discussed the ambiguity of her identity in both France and Portugal. In particular she stressed how others do or do not ratify her identities as legitimate in either country. In Portugal she and her family are seen as émigrés, and therefore as not really Portuguese; in France, she isn’t seen as French. Over there [in Portugal] . . . we are always seen as immigrants, eh, not as Portuguese . . . It’s a pain in the ass . . . You’re not French . . . Over there you’re not Portuguese . . . You don’t know which foot to balance on. You say to me, “what nationality am I really,” y’know.

An asymmetry in Teresa’s sense of national identity emerges here, as she wants to be accepted as Portuguese in both countries, and to be French in nei-

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ther. She directly links her ability to be accepted as Portuguese with her Portuguese language ability and practices. I feel really Portuguese and there [in Portugal] I’ll always make the effort to speak Portuguese, because what repels . . . the Portuguese from over there a little is that you show up, you speak French, they hate that.

She should be accepted as “really” Portuguese, because she conscientiously avoids alienating real “Portuguese” by speaking French. On the other hand, in France, she happily asserts that she is Portuguese, and downplays her ties to France and French. Whereas being French in Portugal is a source of shame, the reverse is not true. Although she’s always lived in France, she claims to feel “100% Portuguese.” Sometimes people say to me [in France], “Are you of Portuguese origin?” I say, “No, I’m Portuguese.” . . . Deep inside me, I feel Portuguese, y’know . . . for the moment I feel Portuguese, but I live in France . . ..Since I’ve studied in France, I know my French culture better than Portuguese culture.

Similarly, she criticizes Luso-descendants who say they are only of Portuguese origin (d’origine portugaise) instead of fully Portuguese. She attributes this to LDs’ shame about being Portuguese. Teresa remembers a brief period during her childhood when she was ashamed of being Portuguese. As she has a common Portuguese last name, a primary-school teacher asked if she was Portuguese. She insisted that she was not. “I had a hard time living with the fact of being Portuguese, because at the time, they [French people] looked down on us . . . so I denied my nationality a little bit.” However, since adolescence, she has very proudly claimed a Portuguese identity in France. That said, she wants to be Portuguese in a way different from that of her parents and other first-generation émigrés. This first-generation Portugueseness is too “traditional.” Teresa greatly prefers, for instance, Portuguese rock musicfrom urban centers to “émigré music,” or “folklore.” Her current strategy is therefore to claim a Portuguese identity in both French and Portuguese contexts. From this discussion of Teresa’s life experiences and plans with both languages and countries, we have a better sense of the broader contexts that use of French and Portuguese might evoke for her. In both languages and countries, she has experienced complex trajectories. In French/France, she has grown up in the ethnically and socioeconomically marked suburbs, but through her networks in France and contact with the French educational system, she has clearly middle-class aspirations. Indeed, she will soon be awarded a degree that should facilitate white-collar employment. However, along with these aspirations to upward mobility, Teresa simultaneously wants to avoid any sense of pretention to bourgeois status. She wants to be educated,

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yet remain “young,” without being an aggressive suburbanite. In Portuguese/Portugal, she tries to distance herself from her parents’ rural, uneducated, migrant backgrounds, as she strives for standard, urban Portuguese, untouched by French. Here her goal is to sound different from her parents, and different from other émigrés/LDs. We now turn from this more general discussion of the role of each language throughout her life, to examples of her actual use of each language. As described earlier, we will see how she tells the “same” narrative of personal experience in French and in Portuguese. Data Analysis In what follows, I present and analyze an example of a story that Teresa told once in each language, comparing discourse patterns both qualitatively and quantitatively. As described above, this is the first of three approaches I use to compare how she is “different” in French and Portuguese. We will then see how Teresa herself talks about how speaking each language affects her. Subsequently, we will then examine how listeners reacted to recordings of each telling. Finally, we see how representative this story pair is of Teresa’s larger corpus of stories told in each language, which will tell us more generally, beyond the single story pair examined, about her patterns of language use in French and Portuguese. Interview Context In the first portion of this study, Teresa told stories of personal experience first in Portuguese, then in French, to two different LD female interviewers. She was previously somewhat acquainted with both from an association for LDs but was not very close to either. The interview put her at ease, and she spoke for over an hour with the interviewers, and for two and a half hours with me during the follow-up interview. Teresa told a total of eleven stories twice, or twenty-two stories altogether. The story that will be analyzed in detail below was told halfway through each story-telling session, in response to the request for a bad experience with someone in France whom she did not know well. Example of a Story Pair The story under analysis is about a confrontation with a male stranger in a bus or train station (la gare/a estação), who objected to Teresa’s prolonged use of a public phone. The full transcript can be found in appendix C. The transcripts of each telling have been broken up into roughly comparable episodes, and these have been placed side-by-side to facilitate comparison. English translations of each appear in parallel to the French and Portuguese. Transcripts have been coded, following the same methods described for the larger corpus in chapter 5. In particular, speaker roles are identified: interlocutory speech has

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been boldfaced, narrator speech italicized, and character speech underlined. Devices that instantiate the interlocutory role, and marked register use in both interlocutory and character frames have also been indicated. Formal Analysis As there are many elements that could be compared in these two tellings, this analysis is not exhaustive. In what follows, I compare elements similar to those analyzed for the larger corpus. I begin by comparing the plots of the two tellings. I then focus on the speaker role perspectives through which Teresa performs each story—the extent to which she speaks as a narrator, a here-andnow interlocutor, and a performed character in the two versions. I then examine in greater detail the strategies she uses within each role. More specifically, I consider the speech registers she adopts with the interviewer (interlocutor register) and the speech register she puts in the mouths of quoted characters (character register), to present stances and personas in the narrating and narrated events. I also compare repertoires of other strategies beyond register that she uses in each version in the interlocutor role. Together, these dimensions of comparison will allow us to address systematically how she verbally enacts each version of the “same” narrative, with a systematic set of tools for contrasting the different evaluations (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972b), footings (Goffman 1979/1981), or voicings (Bakhtin 1981) present in each. Plot Structures In many ways, the plots or event structures of each version resemble each other. In both versions, Teresa narrates, evaluates, and replays a past verbal encounter with an unpleasant, racially identified character. The sequence and content of the narrated events are quite similar. She is using a public telephone in a station. A man approaches her and complains that she has been using the phone for too long. He uses obscene language to insult her in French and Portuguese. He accuses her of being German. She protests in both languages. In both versions, she also reports a second incident in which someone else was using a public phone, and it was Teresa who was waiting for the phone. However, in contrast to the young man in the first incident, she waits politely and patiently. The only events that do not occur in the Portuguese version are her return of his insult, her telling him to go to another booth, and the introduction of an additional character of the same race as her aggressor who serves as his potential ally. As I will demonstrate, the major differences between the two versions emerge less from what is told, but from how those events are told. Therefore, as argued in chapters 5 and 6 for the larger corpus, we will compare the voices and perspectives presented in each version. As described in chapter 5, I coded

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each story for speaker role inhabitance—how the speaker navigates between telling a story, communicating stance and persona in the here-and-now, and performing stances and personas from the there-and-then of the narrated event. More specifically, the story was coded for how often the speaker spoke from the position of narrator (N), who recounts past events; how often she spoke from the position of an interlocutor (I), communicating to the interviewer her current evaluation, attitude, and affect towards the events retold; and how often she spoke from the position of a character in the story (C), through reported speech. We will then see the strategies, devices, and speech registers that she uses within and across these roles. Speaker Role Inhabitance In both versions of the story, Teresa provides far more than a neutral account, shifting regularly among the role perspectives of narrator, interlocutor, and character. However, as shown quantitatively in table 8.1, she speaks more often as a narrator in Portuguese and more often as an interlocutor and slightly more as a character in French. In this respect, Teresa’s story pair fits the patterns described for the larger corpus. These differences might create the impression of a more engaged telling in the French than in the Portuguese, something to be confirmed when we consult listeners’ responses to these two tellings. As explained in chapter 6, because roles can co-occur, percentages exceed 100%.2 Table 8.1 Proportions/Percentages of clauses in each speaker role Narrator Interlocutor Character Total number of clauses

French 37 (n = 96) 37 (n = 99) 46 (n = 118) 100 (n = 257)

Portuguese 49 (n = 82) 31 (n = 53) 42 (n = 71) 100 (n = 168)

These speaker-role trends of greater neutral narration in Portuguese and greater interlocutory and character performance in French are apparent across the two tellings, but can also be examined in individual episodes. For example, in both versions of episode 19 (see appendix C) in which her aggressor calls her a German and she protests, Teresa uses the three roles to advance plot (N), assess the significance of what she’s narrating (I), and replay parts of the narrated event through quotations (C). Note, however, the greater presence of interlocutory coding in the French. The French excerpt is more interlocutory in the most literal sense, as Teresa and the interviewer interact more.

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Specifically, the interviewer laughs and reacts to Teresa’s initial quote of her aggressor’s insult. It is also more interlocutory in the general sense—her extensive breaking from advancement of plot to comment upon the character’s quoted action and his race, and her greater use of markers that encode stance and affect. In the French version, Teresa uses a variety of interlocutory strategies to allude far more explicitly to and discuss the meanings and relevance of race— her aggressor’s and her own. We see this when, after quoting her aggressor, she notes the significance of the quote—“the first thing that insults me.” This is interlocutory for her use of first as an intensifier and the term insult—a relatively high-register metapragmatic descriptor. With these devices, she frames what bothers her about the narrated character’s actions. This utterance elicits a reaction from the interviewer, who then aligns with her, commenting on the oddity of insulting Teresa by calling her a German.3 Teresa then responds using more interlocutory strategies, with the discourse marker voilà (there you go), and another intensifier en plus (on top of that). She then returns to a narrated desciption of his relevant demographic characteristics—that is, his race. The ensuing discussion shows very elaborate interlocutory strategies, as Teresa attempts to accomplish a tricky interactional feat. Teresa claims the relevance of race, in a cultural context of urban, multicultural France, where race is not supposed to matter, while trying not to seem like a racist herself.4 Teresa condemns his invocation of her race, while nevertheless discussing the relevance of his race in this story. In this segment, we see how she points to particular shared visions of interethnic tensions in France and Portugal that she assumes her interviewer shares. How does she accomplish this complex set of feats? She does this first in a very interlocutory way, introducing his race with a socially charged term de couleur (of color). This is a high-register term, roughly equivalent to “of color.” By describing his race in this way (as opposed to other register alternates such as noir, black, renoi, and other more pejorative terms), Teresa perhaps tries to show that, despite her mention of race, she herself is not racist. His race has become relevant, because he has made it so, through his ethnic slur against her (“German”5). Her very use of such a hyperpolite term as de couleur helps to highlight her nonracism. At this point in the telling, she takes an extended interlocutory, parenthetical break from the narrative, in which she expounds more generally about race relations in France. By directly appealing to the interviewer with a second-person pronoun, quand tu vois (when you see), she invites the interviewer to share her stance on the story and this aggressive character. Similarly, she continues with the strategy of talking about race in a relatively high register, “racial problems that there are in France.” This begins to sound more like a sociological analysis than a comment to a like-minded peer. Note then her shift to describing such “problems” between

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les noirs et les blancs (blacks and whites), abandoning her earlier use of the more politically correct de couleur. The combined use of these multiple interlocutory strategies in this excerpt accomplishes several feats—to persuade her interviewer to agree with her, to show her investment in the storytelling, to invoke unspoken assumptions about race, and to assert her nonracism. As Teresa dramatically replays the quotation of how he brought up her race as well as her response, the remainder of this episode contains a combination of narrator and character roles. She performs a quote of her incredulity, not just in the here-and-now with the interviewer, but in the narrated event with her aggressor. She does this by requoting his insult back to him, “Allemande?”/ “German?”, displaying her shock that he has mentioned her race/ethnicity. She then quotes his confirmation that he fully intended his racial epithet. She next quotes herself both denying the veracity of his slur (she’s not German), and very directly challenging its relevance, “Qu’est-ce que ça peut faire?” (“What’s that got to do with it?”). With this fairly colloquial quoted retort, she shows that she has both challenged him and refused to be intimidated. Her quote echoes the unstated premise that in an ideally color-blind social world, any mention of race only worsens race relations. In particular, she implies that those who fall on the lower end of the French hierarchy of racially identified groups should be the most color-blind. As such, she insinuates that, as a member of a racial minority, he in particular has a lot of audacity to be racist, as he has more to lose from racialized remarks. By performing her quoted objection, she is voicing a socioculturally recognizable perspective that she expects her interviewer to also recognize and affirm. Through these complex voicing strategies, Teresa may also be alluding to another dimension of interracial/interethnic relations in France, that is, that she and the interviewer are also both members of another potentially stigmatized, though differently positioned ethnic minority—Portuguese. Here she can align herself with the interviewer as a fellow Portuguese, a “model” minority, against the presented image of a member of a “bad” minority. Here, she alludes to an implicit ranking of ethnic minorities in France. The Portuguese are stereotypically seen as more “well-behaved,” discrete, and less disruptive of social order than groups of North and West African origin. She is a “civilized,” polite minority, in contrast to her aggressor, who is made to embody the stereotype of the disaffected, aggressive second-generation of migration from France’s former colonies. However, although she nods to these differences in the interlocutory frame, within the story itself, her Portuguese identity never becomes visible to him. She makes it seem that he has taken her to be of white, Northern European origin. Therefore, one sees in the French segment how Teresa moves among three roles, to describe what happened, establish her own blamelessness, present and

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contest the other character’s actions, and allude to implicit cultural beliefs. She does this in parallel fashion, both to the interviewer (in interlocutory speech), and to the character (in quoted speech). In this way, she ambivalently positions herself as a member of a minority group and as a nonracist, while she indirectly evokes the negative racialized stereotype of a young black man, as a sexist, suburban thug. Through her use of complex interlocutory and character voicing strategies, Teresa indexes a variety of cultural positions about race in contemporary, urban France, while situating herself, the interviewer, and the character of her aggressor relative to these positions. In the comparable Portuguese episode, she delivers a similar skeleton of narrated actions, but with far less interlocutory speech. As talk about race remains a sensitive topic, the three interlocutory devices also cluster around her mention of his race. As in the French, this is the moment when the interviewer responds, showing her implicit alignment with Teresa. There are no neutral terms for describing race in Portuguese either. Teresa uses the term preto, a colloquial, rather disparaging term roughly equivalent to “colored.” Its indexical power to signal a speaker’s attitudes about race are quite different from those in the French de couleur. Preto harkens back to Portugal’s not-sodistant colonial past. Outside of urban centers, where LDs’ parents grew up, it is probably still the most frequently used descriptor for someone of subSaharan African origin. It is unclear whether Teresa is aware of the complex history, connotations, and attitudes she evokes through its use. Overall, what one culls from this portion of the Portuguese telling is a far more cursory discussion of race, with a nonetheless more negatively charged racial descriptor. She still makes race relevant in the Portuguese version, but does less to defuse or guard against possible reactions to her mention of it. In general, although she does succeed in getting the interviewer to nod to the relevance of race, Teresa does not engage in as extensive interlocutory commentary about its significance in the Portuguese. Beyond this episode, despite her fairly extensive replay of dialogue, one notes Teresa’s overall lesser interlocutory framing of this set of events. Why this difference between the two versions of this episode? It is not surprising that this highly charged topic elicits much interlocutory framing and character enactment, but why would there be more in French than in Portuguese? On the one hand, speaking French may instantiate a context of French social reality for Teresa, in which she has different, if not better, access to the multiple contested meanings of race. The importance of presenting oneself as and appearing nonracist may be more specific to urban France. Indeed, she may be generally more “conversant” in interethnic relations in urban France/French, than in rural Portugal/Portuguese. On the other hand, in Portuguese, she adopts the racial term probably used by her parents and family in rural Portugal, and engages in less explanation of the salience of his race.

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She may be echoing the voices of racial ideologies she has heard articulated by family for whom the fact of encountering a black man is itself seen as sufficiently menacing to require no further interlocutory elaboration. However, the difference in speaker-role patterns we see for this segment appears not only in her discussion of this particular topic, but is present more generally throughout the story, as shown in table 8.1, and as we will see in table 8.2 below, in Teresa’s overall corpus of French and Portuguese stories. As a generalized trend, she speaks more as an interlocutor and character in French, and more as a narrator in Portuguese. This means that Teresa engages in a set of consistently different strategies of presenting, evaluating, and performing events in each language throughout the two narratives. Registers in the Mouth of Teresa’s Here-and-Now Self So we have seen that Teresa performs the three roles to differing extents in these two tellings. We turn now to how she speaks within these different roles. What socially marked lexical resources does she use across these speaker roles? We first consider the styles she adopts in her here-and-now persona as interlocutor/narrator. As opposed to speech from a character of herself or someone else at a different time and place, narrator/interlocutor speech is what she uses as “her own” in the narrating event and the social interaction with the interviewer. When speaking in her “own,” nonquoted voice, she resorts to more extremes of high and vulgar speech in French, and more familiar speech in Portuguese. This pattern is evident in episode 36 in appendix C, the conclusion of the story. Both versions are dense in interlocutory devices that serve to comment on narrated incidents, that is, that mark why she is and was upset by what happened. However, the Portuguese remains in a relatively neutral register. There is one shift to a higher register, with her use of enervam-se (they get angry). In the French, however, Teresa uses vulgar and high registers back to back—gueuler (bawl/chew out) as a vulgar metapragmatic verb, insulter (insult), and profondément (deeply) as a highregister metapragmatic and intensifier. The contrasting styles she adopts in her interlocutory guises may create a sense of a different type of socially locatable person in each language. This will be confirmed this when we see how listeners responded to the two tellings.

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Table 8.2 Percentages of clauses in different registers in narrator-interlocutory roles Unmarked Familiar High Vulgar Other language Total marked

French 75.5 (n = 105) 5.8 (n = 8) 12.9 (n = 18) 5.8 (n = 8) 0.0 (n = 0) 24.5 (n = 35)

Portuguese 75.3 (n = 73) 14.4 (n = 14) 7.2 (n = 7) 2.1 (n = 2) 1.0 (n = 1) 24.7 (n = 24)

In the excerpts below, I have provided additional examples from thoughout both tellings of her contrasting interlocutory register use in French and Portuguese. The underlined segments represent the items to be compared across versions. As opposed to quantitative comparison, here we see the nonequivalent registers for the “same” referent. Excerpt 8.1 French versus Portuguese interlocutory register Portuguese 1. chegou um carro, tinha, ‘tava lá um homem e uma mulher, começaram a mandar vir , mas à sério 2. mas ele começou a mandar vir mesmo 3. e a moça que ‘tava com ele disse assim 4. e eu portanto, e ele era preto 5. qué é que eu fiz, não ia a mandar vir English translation of Portuguese 1. a car arrived, there was there was a man and a woman, they started making noise, but really 2. but he started to make noise/yell a lot, like 3. and the girl who was with him, said like this 4. and I therefore, and he was colored 5. what did I do, I wasn’t going to make noise

French 1. et euh il y avait une voiture à côté de la cabine et euh le type il commence à à, pas à gueuler 2. et puis, quoi, le mec commence vraiment à s’énerver, tu vois 3. oui, et la bonne femme, elle disait 4. en plus, lui, il était de couleur 5. ben, qu’est-ce que j’allais, j’allais pas commencer à gueuler English translation of French 1. and uh, there was a car next to the the phone booth and uh and the guy , he starts to to, not yelling, 2. and then, and then y’know, the guy starts to really get mad, you see 3. and the broad, she was saying, 4. there you go, on top of that, he was of color 5. well, what was I going to, I wasn’t going to start yelling

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To describe other characters and their actions, Teresa consistently uses more vulgar descriptors in French than in Portuguese—homem/type (man/guy), mandar vir/gueuler (scold/chew out), moça/bonne femme (girl/broad), ele/ le mec (him/the guy).6 In Portuguese “homem” (man) is a very neutral descriptor, as compared to type (guy) in French, (which stands in contrast to the neutral homme, the more marked mec, or marked for its formality, monsieur). Throughout the Portuguese, she refers to this character in consistently more neutral language, as o homem, ele, a null subject, and only twice, toward the end of the story, as o gajo, the more pejorative term. In Portuguese she consistently uses the term mandar vir (scold/make noise), with or without an intensifier to describe his actions metapragmatically. She may then intensify mandar vir with neutral intensifiers such as mesmo and à sério, to compensate for her lesser register variation in Portuguese. In French she consistently uses the metapragmatic gueuler (“yell,” but more vulgar, like most words with the stem gueule in French) to characterize how the aggressor addressed her. Gueuler is a more vulgar metapragmatic in French than mandar vir (scold) in Portuguese. In this interlocutory mode, she later refers to the accoster’s girlfriend as moça, in Portugese a slightly familiar reference for “woman.” In French, she becomes la bonne femme (roughly equivalent to “broad”), which is in a significantly more familiar register. Throughout this story, we see that she jumps between the extremes in French, of hip, justified frustration (in familiar/vulgar speech) and the stance of an educated liberal (de couleur), who does not otherwise judge on the basis of race (in formal speech). In Portuguese, she limits herself to a more middleof-the-road familiar style—less concerned with showing the tensions she displays in French between conveying a sense of polite gentility and assertive intolerance for a thug. These different speech styles that she adopts in the narrator/interlocutory frame in French and Portuguese then become a resource that she uses to convey complex, even contradictory, attitudes and personas. Interlocutory Strategies Although all narrator-interlocutor speech can be coded for its speech register, as done above, register is one of an interrelated set of overlapping strategies that speakers use to display identity, attitude, and affect. If one looks more generally at the range of interlocutory devices Teresa uses in both languages, we see a range of important contrasts, shown in table 8.3. In this table, we see that she uses a consistently different set of strategies in French and Portuguese tellings: relatively more intensifiers in Portuguese, but more shifts to a vulgar register, discourse particles, and second-person invitations in French. As seen in examples above, she often uses an adverbial intensifier in Portuguese, where she would use familiar or vulgar register in French.

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Table 8.3 Interlocutory device proportions Shifts to familiar Shifts to high Shifts to vulgar Shifts to other language Total register shifts Intensifiers Second-person Interjections Discourse markers Parentheticals Laughter Sighs Gasps Total

French 12.4 (n = 16) 14.0 (n = 18)) 11.6 (n = 15) 0.0 (n = 0) 38.0 (n = 49) 15.5 (n = 20) 7.0 (n = 9) 1.0 (n = 1) 17.1 (n = 22) 20.9 (n = 27) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 1.0 (n = 1) 100.0 (n = 129)

Portuguese 20.5 (n = 15) 9.6 (n = 7) 8.2 (n = 6) 1.4 (n = 1) 39.7 (n = 29) 24.7 (n = 18) 0.0 (n = 0) 4.1 (n = 3) 11.0 (n = 8) 20.5 (n = 15) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 100.0 (n = 73)

Character Speech As replaying of the verbal deeds of herself and others is a key part of this story, in addition to speech in the narrating-interlocutory role, I also investigate how Teresa presents and performs the speech in the role of characters in the narrated event. This involves investigating the speech registers in which these there-and then personas are made to speak. As shown in the tables 8.4-8.6 below, the registers in which she quotes characters differ markedly between the two tellings. In general, all quoted characters speak in a lower register (more vulgar and more familiar) in French than in Portuguese.

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Table 8.4 Percentage of all direct quotation in each speech register All C(haracter) speech Unmarked C Familiar C High C Vulgar C Other language C Marked C total

French 100.0 (n = 100) 72.0 (n = 72) 25.0 (n = 25) 0.0 (n = 0) 3.0 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 28.0 (n = 28)

Portuguese 100.0 (n = 60) 76.7 (n = 46) 18.3 (n = 11) 5.0 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 23.3 (n = 14)

As characters who speak in such contrasting styles may come across as distinct kinds of culturally recognizable types, it is valuable to know not only how she makes all quoted characters speak in general, but how different types of characters are made to speak. In tables 8.5 and 8.6, I also make the further distinction of investigating how Teresa uses quoted speech to present herself versus others as characters. How does Teresa make herself speak? More pronounced than the trend for all character speech, she generally has quoted versions of herself using more familiar and vulgar speech in French than in Portuguese, shown in table 8.5. Table 8.5 Percentage of direct quotations of self (C1) rendered in each speech register C 1 all C1 unmarked C1 familiar C1 high C1 vulgar C1 other language C1 marked

French 100.0 (n = 65) 76.9 (n = 50) 20.0 (n = 13) 0.0 (n = 0) 3.1 (n = 2) 0.0 (n = 0) 23.1 (n = 15)

Portuguese 100.0 (n = 40) 80.0 (n = 32) 17.5 (n = 7) 2.5 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 20.0 (n = 8)

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Below, I have assembled many of the examples of self-quotation in both languages. In particular, we see the most striking example of this different style of self-quotation when she replays how she insults him back, in number 3 of the excerpts that follow. The items to be compared have been underlined. Excerpt 8.2 Self quotation French versus Portuguese Portuguese

French

1. disse, “a essa é a melhor, agora tenho a cara alemã.”

1. j’ dis, “mais attendez, euh, d’abord chuis pas allemande, et puis qu’est-ce que ça peut faire,” 2. je lui dis, “écoutez, chuis pas restée une heure, je suis restée cinq minutes,”

2. e eu digo “escute lá, mas os telefones, o problema não é o seu, eu só tive aqui que cinco minutos. portanto não venha mandar vir,” 3. disse assim , “’tá bem, ‘tá bem, tens razão, vai lá, vai lá a tua vida, que eu vou à minha.”

3. je me suis dit, “okay, d’accord, d’accord, d’accord, ok, c’est ta vie, moi j’ai la mienne.” je l’ai traité de, “de toute façon, vous êtes qu’un con , pour insulter des gens comme ça, euh.” 4. “mais attendez si vous étiez,” ah oui, comme il était en voiture, je lui ai dit, “ mais écoutez , si c’est urgent, prenez votre voiture, vous allez à un autre téléphone, ça fait cinq minutes que je suis là, commencez pas à gueuler,”

English translation of Portuguese

English translation of French

1. I said, “that’s the best one, now I look like a German.”

1. I say, “hold on, uh, first of all I’m not German, and anyway, what’s it have to do with anything,” 2. I say to him. “look , I didn’t stay an hour, I stayed five minutes,”

2. and I say, “look here, phones, the problem isn’t yours, I’ve only been here five minutes. therefore don’t come yell at me,” 3. I said like this, “okay, okay. you’re right, go on ahead, go on ahead to your*f life, I’ll go with mine,”

3. I said to myself, “okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, it’s your*f life, I have my own,” I called him, “anyway, you’re just an asshole for insulting people like that, uh,” 4. I say to him, “hold on, if you were,” oh yes, as he was in the car, I said to

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him, “but look, if it’s urgent, take your car, go to another phone, I’ve been here for five minutes, don’t start yelling ,”

In these excerpts, one notes a harsher, more assertive quality to the French self-quotations. This is most striking Teresa’s quote of herself calling him a con (an asshole) in the third excerpt above. In both tellings, she quotes herself saying what she would have liked to say to him, “‘tá bem, tens razão” (okay, you’re right), but in French she actually insults him back in the same register he uses with her. She parallels his “vous êtes qu’une pute” (you’re just a whore) with her own “vous êtes qu’un con” (you’re just an asshole). This quoted comeback is entirely absent from the Portuguese. As will be seen below, both Teresa and listeners spontaneously remarked on the significance of this quote, and its absence in Portuguese, for making her seem different in the two languages. Whether this difference comes from her inability and/or reluctance to use comparable speech with him, it nonetheless bears upon who she presents herself as being/having been. She consistently performs herself as a quoted character who goes on record as having spoken quite differently in French and Portuguese. One can also systematically compare how she presents the speech of others (see table 8.6 below). In particular, one notes the contrasting ways in which she makes the aggressor speak. Like her, he is more familiar and vulgar in French than in Portuguese. This may result in his coming across as a more unpleasant character in French, to be confirmed by listener reactions. Table 8.6 Percentages of other-quotations (C3) rendered in each speech register

C 3 all C3 unmarked C3 familiar C3 high C3 vulgar C3 other language C3 marked

French 100.0 (n = 35) 62.9 (n = 22) 34.3 (n = 12) 0.0 (n = 0) 2.9 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 0) 37.1 (n = 13)

Portuguese 100.0 (n = 20) 70.0 (n = 14) 20.0 (n = 4) 10.0 (n = 2) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 30.0 (n = 6)

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In the following excerpts, one can see this difference in how she has him speak. Excerpt 8.3 Quotation of aggressor in French versus Portuguese: Portuguese 1. “pois, os os telefones nas estações só é para urgências, já ‘ta aí há mais de dez minutos,” 2. “pois, os telefones não não são para para estar as horas ao telefone, aqui nas estações, é só para , quando há problema,” 3. tratou-me dos nomes de todos os nomes , de puta, de ,

4. tratou-me de Alemã,

5. e a tratar-me de Alemã, e puta, e não sei, e , todos, vem cá chupar, coisas assim horríveis, pá , horríveis English translation of Portuguese 1.”yeah, the the phones in stations, it’s only for emergencies, you’ve been here f for more than ten minutes,” 2.“yeah , phones aren’t aren’t for staying hours on the phone, here in train stations, it’s only for, when there’s a problem,” 3. he called me names, by every name, whore, by,

4. he called me a German,

5. and calling me a German, and whore, and I dunno, and , all of them, come suck me, horrible things like that, man, horrible

French 1. “bon, ça suffit, maintenant euh, ”

2.“ouais,ça fait plus de cinq minutes que vous êtes là -dedans, euh, euh, de toute façon les téléphones euh euh auprès de les- à côté des gares c’est vraiment que pour les urgences,” 3. le mec, il m’a insultée de tous les noms, de tous les noms, alors il m’a traité de pute, de conne, de salope, et vienviens suce, 4. et à un moment, il me dit, “Allemande.” “ouais euh le téléphone, c’est pas fait pour euh, pour rester une heure,” 5. “non, vous êtes pas restée cinq minutes, et puis d’abord vous êtes qu’une qu’une pute, une,” English translation of French 1. “okay, that’s enough uh,”

2. “yeah you’ve been in there/that thing for more than five minutes, uh, uh, at any rate, the phones, uh uh near by stations, it’s really only for emergencies,” 3. the guy, he insulted me with every name, every name, so he called me a whore, a bitch, a slut, and come- come suck, 4. and at one point, he says to me, “German.” “yeah, the phone, it’s not made for uh, for staying on an hour,” 5. “no, you weren’t on five minutes, and then at any rate, you’re just a , just a whore, a,”

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He speaks at greater length in French, and insults her with a broader array of expletives (pute, conne, salope, viens-suce); in the Portuguese, only puta and vem ca chupar. In the Portuguese, she then interrupts her report of his insult to summarize the insults in narrator and interlocutory mode (coisas assim horríveis, pá, horríveis) refraining from an equivalently extensive replay in Portuguese. As we see, the characters of herself and of others are not presented as speaking in equivalent styles. What accounts for these differences? Perhaps she feels she cannot fully evoke personas of vulgar, racially marked insulters in Portuguese—because such comparable personas are not available to her, culturally, or personally. She may either not be able to or not feel comfortable making him and herself seem equally “vulgar” in Portuguese as in French. Regardless of the reason, whether such personas could ever be the “same,” she does not draw from linguistic material out of which she might fashion such equivalent personas. Summary of Formal Analysis of Teresa’s Story Pair In both languages, Teresa switches frequently among narrator, character, and interlocutory stances—narrating to, replaying for, and evaluating this event with the interviewer. Both versions are told from consistently different role perspectives—as a more neutral narrator in Portuguese, and as a more engaged in the here-and-now interlocutor, and a there-and-then character in French. Furthermore, how she enacts here-and-now and there-and-then personas, in both interlocutory and character frames, is not equivalent. Across frames, she tries to present herself as reasonable, and her aggressor as unreasonable in both languages. In the interlocutory frame, throughout the French telling, she colludes more with her interviewer. This was particularly evident in her discussion of charged social issues, such as race and racism, where she implicitly pointed to a range of associated cultural beliefs and taboos. In the character frame, she makes the quoted incarnations of the stranger and herself more aggressive in the French. The end effect, through her use of these different verbal strategies, is that she highlights more in French her own more assertive self-defense, and his more vulgar insults. To further determine the local significance of these differences, we will now see the effect that these different performances had both on Teresa herself and on listeners. Experiences of Self, Language, and Context in French and Portuguese Turning to the second method of understanding how Teresa is different in both languages, we can ask about the relationship between the formal differences observed in the transcriptions of these two tellings and Teresa’s own experience of the tellings. In this section, we examine her own post hoc discussion of

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how she feels using each language. Drawing from the discussion in chapter 4 of how bilinguals report their experience of speaking two languages, people may understand the role of (a) language in how they feel in a variety of ways. These different ways draw from and assume particular semiotic relationships among language, self, interaction, and experience that are shaped by local language ideologies. More specifically, drawing from Irvine and Gal’s (2000) discussion of iconization and recursivity, people may impose an ascription from one level (the ascribed qualities of a language) to another level (the ascribed qualities of a group of speakers), to another (the speaker’s personality in that language). It is in such ways that speakers may describe the effect of using their multiple languages in more or less folk-linguistic, folk-cultural, or folk-psychological terms. Indeed Teresa invokes such multilevel accounts of the influence of her two languages on speakers and contexts. Although she draws upon multiple, sometimes contradictory-seeming accounts of this difference, taken together, these indicate that she does experience the effect of using each language differently. When I first asked Teresa to tell me how she felt telling the same stories in French and Portuguese, she initially focused on the similarity in content between the two tellings, highlighting a referential level of meaning. “I didn’t feel a lot of difference . . . I still succeeded, even though it’s not the same words . . . the idea was translated in both languages, y’know.” Here she emphasizes the sense of a stable “core” meaning across tellings, despite the difference in form, or “words.” Perhaps this reflects, on one level, her referential understanding of the “meanings” in these two stories, whose plots are so similar. This, however, was just the beginning of her discussion of the relative differences and similarities between speaking French and Portuguese. Her next impulse was to discuss differences between tellings that come from her differential ease and fluidity of speaking French and Portuguese. She also describes the role of the nonequivalence of her lexicon in the two languages. In Portuguese she had to “look more for my words,” whereas in French she has no “vocabulary problems,” so it “flows.” She subsequently provided a more nuanced account of the different vocabulary she uses in French and Portuguese, suggesting that she might not master equivalently colloquial expressions in the two languages. She provided an example of this from a story pair in which she had described a particular character’s shame. In French, she had used a very familiar-vulgar expression (elle avait les boules, literally “she had the balls”) (See chapter 6). This expression suggests that the character was so upset, that her (metaphorical) testicles rose into her throat. In Portuguese, Teresa remembered that at the equivalent moment in the story, she had instead said, “Ela teve vergonha” literally, “She was ashamed.” In this instance, the French expression is far more colloquial than the quite neutral Portuguese. Teresa captures this nonequivalence by saying, “I wanted to say

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‘Elle avait les boules’ [in Portuguese] . . . it came to me in French, but I couldn’t translate it . . . the idea in Portuguese . . . so I must have said ‘Ela teve vergonha’ . . . You see, it wasn’t really the right idea.” Although Teresa believes that these expressions in some sense “mean” the same thing referentially, she acknowledges a difference from another aspect of meaning (“the right idea”) that was not communicated. Here we get a sense that French and Portuguese stories were different for her because she used lexical items from nonequivalent registers, different ways of saying the same thing. From this, we see that along with her initial discussion of the referential similarity between the two sets of tellings, her understanding of the meaning conveyed in French and Portuguese also goes beyond the referential, to the more sociopragmatic. Unlike many other LDs (see chapter 4), Teresa does not then frame the sociopragmatic differences between her two languages in psychological terms, or as having psychological consequences. She does not use recursive or iconizing strategies (Irvine and Gal 2000) to claim that these sociopragmatic differences reflect differences in her intrinsic “psychology”or “character” in French and Portuguese. Specifically, Teresa does not report feeling that she’s a different person in each language. Instead she appeals to the different temperament that the languages themselves (rather than the the users) inherently express. According to Teresa, French is intrinsically more aggressive than Portuguese. “It’s [Portuguese] more singsong . . . It’s more friendly . . . It’s prettier. It makes me a lot happier . . . It’s much more pleasant . . . It’s not an aggressive language . . . French can be aggressive . . . Portuguese is a less aggressive language.” In this way, she situates differences in her tellings not to differences in who she is, but to different built-in qualities of the languages themselves. In addition to these first three understandings of the nature of the relative similarity/difference of the two languages (referential, sociopragmatic effects of using lexical items from different registers, code-level differences in the “mentality” encoded in a language), she provides an additional sociopragmatic account of the impact of each language. She cites multiple instances of how each language allows her to “do” different social actions. Specifically, she is more likely to resort to verbal aggression in French, being more likely to insult someone in French than in Portuguese. She gives the example of the very story pair presented above. “When I was attacked by the guy, on the phone . . . I called him a dirty asshole right away. It came to me in French, y’know.” Here she refers to the moment when she quoted herself reciprocating her aggressor’s insult. From this we see that although she does not talk about how each language affects her personality, each language lets her perform different speech acts. Together, we see the myriad, partially interrelated ways she interprets the effects of each language. While first stating the referential

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similarity between her French and Portuguese stories, she notes that she has access to more familiar and vulgar vocabulary in French. French is a more aggressive language, and she acts with verbal aggression more readily in French than in Portuguese. For Teresa, beyond the capacity of each language to express the same content, each language is thus a vehicle for different degrees of aggressiveness, and each language allows one to do different (more or less aggressive) things with others (such as insults). Her account of the importance of each language is one of access to different kinds of vocabulary, to different intrinsic qualities of the language, and to different interactional feats. It is in these multiple ways that Teresa states that speaking French and Portuguese does indeed evoke something quite different for her. We will now see how her self-reports relate to how others perceive her. Listener Reactions Turning to the third method for understanding Teresa’s difference in French and Portuguese, relative to Teresa’s report and observed formal differences, we will now consider listeners’ reactions to recordings of the two tellings. As described most fully in chapter 7, to further appreciate the local meanings evoked by these stories, I had five other demographically similar bilinguals listen to both versions of this story. I asked these listeners a series of openended questions about their reactions to the speaker and her story. Specifically, I asked them to comment on how they interpreted Teresa’s ways of talking, how they imagined her, how they imagined other characters in the story, and how Teresa seemed to feel during the two tellings. Such listener remarks allow us to see an additional perspective on the indigenous, coherent sense of persona and context Teresa evoked in each telling. Perceptions of Teresa’s Speech As described in earlier chapters, listeners’ perceptions of persona and affect are tied up with their perceptions of speech itself. For example, listeners may describe someone as aggressive by explicitly describing her aggressive speech, iconically linking character and language. Listeners’ comments about how they perceived Teresa, the aggressor, and her affect sometimes made explicit reference to her way of speaking as evidence for their perceptions. What did listeners explicitly say about Teresa’s use of both languages? Most listeners commented approvingly on the relative purity of each language from the influence of the other. They reported that her Portuguese does not give her away as living in France, the ultimate compliment from one LD to another. They then heard her French and Portuguese speech as linking her demographically to particular geographic and social locations in both countries. In Portuguese, most situated her as being different from other recorded speakers, in that she did not sound like she was not from a small rural village in the

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north, but from a larger city in the south, corresponding closer to where standard Portuguese is spoken. As one said, “not from all the way north . . . She could be from a big city . . . or from a city, very simply, maybe not from a little hole . . . [I] could imagine is from Portugal . . . It’s a neutral accent.” Another reported that, “she has a good accent . . . I like it . . . It’s a good Portuguese . . . not a Portuguese of the lost countryside, it’s not a Portuguese from the academy ((laugh)), but it’s a very correct Portuguese.” After hearing her French, listeners generally perceived her to sound like someone from around Paris, and to have “young,” but not uneducated-sounding language. None thought she sounded Portuguese. In this way, listeners perceived her to sound like a monolingual French and monolingual Portuguese speaker, with few or no signs of her bilingual/bicultural background in either language. For LDs, this is a praiseworthy accomplishment. Listeners also commented on the register or “level” of her language in French and Portuguese. They generally perceived her Portuguese to be less familiar than her French, with three of the five listeners reporting that she spoke in a more familiar register in French than in Portuguese. In Portuguese, her register use was described as either courant (everyday) or familier by all the listeners. Her French was described as jeune, from Paris or the banlieue, and spanning the range, across listeners, between courant-familier to familiervulgaire. Even when listeners rated both versions as familiar, the French version was evaluated as being more so. This was particularly the case when listeners were asked to compare the register of specific expressions. For example, the Portuguese dar uma lambada was rated by all as familiar, but not nearly as familiar as ’foutre un ‘gnon’ in French. Listeners were thus sensitive to the social locations they saw her as occupying in French/France and Portuguese/Portugal and to the nonequivalence of her speech registers in French and Portuguese. Personas of Self and Other In both versions, listeners thought Teresa and her accoster came across differently, taking on different kinds of local social personas. Unlike Teresa herself, who did not attribute differences in her French and Portuguese to differences in her personality, listeners were quick to attribute the differences they heard to more intrinsic differences in who she was and how she felt. Perceptions of Teresa as a Person Listeners consistently imagined the French-speaking Teresa to be more selfassertive or aggressive. “In French she is more of a fighter . . . In French she shows more that she really didn’t let herself be walked on.” The majority (four of five) thought that she defended herself more effectively in French. All reacted specifically to her quote of herself calling him an asshole. One listener

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said, “[In French] she stays appropriate with him, even if at a certain moment, she- she goes to his level, calling him a dirty asshole/idiot ((laugh)) . . . so, someone attacks her, she answers back, that’s normal . . . She put him in his place.” Teresa’s “vous êtes qu’un con” is taken as a sign to listeners of Teresa’s French nature—that she is a person who does not take abuse. On the other hand, listeners saw her as more passive, calm, and conciliatory in Portuguese. “In Portuguese] she tries to be diplomatic, not to get too mad . . . She likes the respect of other people.” Another commented that, “she tries not to inflame things . . . She takes things calmly, saying all the while that that there was nothing to get angry about . . . She knew how to keep control.” And another reported that she was, “very nice, very patient, someone who doesn’t want to get tangled up with someone else, she avoids conflict . . . She doesn’t want to get angry with people in general . . . She stays polite . . . She respects people.” In Portuguese, the listeners thus found her to let herself be more readily mistreated or walked on. Two listeners said that they would prefer to befriend her in Portuguese, precisely because she seemed less aggressive and vulgar in that version. The way she speaks to her interviewer and the way she presents herself as having spoken to her aggressor were thus interpreted as signs of the kind of person Teresa is. Note how one listener explicitly connected this to a difference in “personality” in her two languages: “It’s not the same thing . . . In the Portuguese, she leaves beaten/battered . . . She was very polite, whereas in French she isn’t . . . I see a difference of personality between the first version in Portuguese and the second.” Listeners therefore consistently saw her as different (relatively more or less assertive) along the same dimensions in the two versions. This shows the concrete effect that the formally observed differences in her stories had on others. Perceptions of the Character of the Aggressor in Teresa’s Story Listeners also perceived her aggressor in consistently contrasting ways in French and Portuguese versions. He was perceived as unpleasant and ill-mannered in both versions. However, listeners typically had a more negative image of him in French than in Portuguese, linked to how Teresa made him speak. One listener reported that, “((in Portuguese)) someone who gets carried away very quickly . . . He’s very aggressive . . . violent . . . We see him clearly as someone not respectable at all . . . through his words . . . He’s not someone very intelligent . . . ((in French)) we see that he is really vulgar, y’know . . . We feel it more in French.” Listeners thus thought he came across as more vulgar, younger, and more aggressive in French than in Portuguese. He was also pictured to be a different kind of character in Portuguese. Listeners had images of him, corresponding to their images of socially locatable

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French and Portuguese stereotypes. In the Portuguese telling he was perceived to be a rural hick, and in French to be a suburban hoodlum. For example, one listener described the aggressor in the Portuguese telling as follows: This way of the Portuguese sometimes . . . this ease that they have of insulting girls as soon as things go badly . . . you feel hatred sometimes in their words . . . That’s it, they say to you “dirty who:re” . . . et cetera. In France it’s it’s rare, even those hoods, you know, dudes from the projects . . . generally it’s guys that aren’t at all cultivated . . . like we say hi(h)cks, you know . . . it’s guys with no culture . . . who have no manners . . . You see guys who drink a lot.

In fact, this story pair was unusual, because Teresa never specified whether this event had originally occurred in France or Portugal. Consequently, all five listeners had difficulty determining in which language or country the event must have originally taken place. Furthermore, because Teresa had so successfully performed the story in French and in Portuguese, listeners could believe that the scene and the characters had occured either in French, in a suburb of Paris, or in Portugal. When she told it in Portuguese I imagined the scene in Portugal . . . I realize that now, in fact, no, I think it happened in France . . . It’s a situation that very well could have happened in Portugal.

This ambiguity over where the scene occurred forced listeners to make explicit their images of believable French versus Portuguese personas and contexts. When listeners thought that this scene had taken place in Portugal, and that this accoster was therefore Portuguese, they described a socioculturally imaginable Portuguese male type, related to stereotyped images of racial minorities in Portugal. For example, when thinking the story was Portuguese, one listener said: In Portugal . . . people of color, I don’t see them as as aggressive . . . in relation . . . to my experience, but here [in France], yes, they get carried away more easily…over there, they stay pretty discrete, whereas here, each time there is a problem . . . they’re involved . . . they aren’t discrete.

After hearing the French version, however, listeners suddenly decided the scene must have in fact originally taken place in France. They all quickly transposed the situation from a Portuguese context to a suburban context in France, with correspondingly different characters. However, as soon as one listener decided that the scene was really French, she reported that the accoster “changed nationalities.” By “changing nationalities,” the character went from being a creepy, older hick, to a “hood from the projects,” a younger, tougher banlieusard, as the whole scene and its cast of characters got transposed to a French context. Although one could comment on the not-so-subtle racism in

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some of the listeners’ comments, at issue here is that each version evoked French as opposed to Portuguese stereotyped images. One sees, through these comments, that listeners formed consistently different images of both Teresa and her accoster in French and Portuguese tellings. They were quick to link differences of ways of speaking to differences in ways of being. Affective Intensity As noted in Koven (2004b), Irvine (1990), and Lutz and White (1986), local notions of person and of how different types of persons display feeling are often intertwined. Related to how listeners perceived Teresa as a person are perceptions of how they perceived her feelings and reactions, both as a character within the story and as an interlocutor telling the story. In terms of her affective displays during the tellings, generally listeners found her to be “into” the telling of both versions,7 although two thought that she was more engaged in the French telling. One noted that she shows more “her state of nervous energy” and that she “shows more her reaction” in the French. Another reported that in French “she invests herself more.” The French version seemed more involved to one listener because Teresa “replays more of his insults” and shows “more of the tension” between the characters. However, two others found her equally involved in both versions. Specifically, one said, “just as involved, she relives the situation just as much [in both languages] . . . She was really in the story.” This shows that she was perceived to be either equally affectively engaged in both tellings or somewhat more in French. This correlates with the formal coding that she was somewhat more interlocutor- and character-focused in French. In these remarks, we see that listeners judged Teresa as more aggressive in French, affectively engaged, and as using different styles of speech. Listeners seemed to connect these levels in their overall impressions of her because she uses more “aggressive” (i.e., familiar and vulgar) language, such as calling her accoster an asshole. The listeners thus connected the language level and affective style with the overall harshness of a persona. Summary of Three Approaches Using these three different methods, we have three convergent sources of material about how Teresa is “different” in French and Portuguese: (1). formal analysis of the same story told in both languages, (2). Tereas’s comments about her experience of speaking in each language, and (3). listeners’ reactions to the two versions of the story. These three sources overlap, showing how her particular manners of speaking and the images of persons and languages evoked/invoked through them are intertwined for participants. We see that she uses discourse forms, particularly familiar and vulgar quoted and interlocutory

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speech to a greater extent in French. She herself describes her more colloquial vocabulary in French. She then describes each language as more aggressive and reports her own greater propensity to insult others in French. Finally, others heard her as more aggressive in both languages. These perceptions and experiences are mediated by Teresa’s use of socially saturated French and Portuguese language forms, distributed across different speaker roles. Her patterns of language use, reported experience, and others’ perceptions of her provide three complementary, mutually confirmatory perspectives of how she is indeed “different” in French and Portuguese. Teresa’s Overall Profile Listeners only heard one of Teresa’s story pairs in each language, upon which they reported their impressions. Does one want to conclude that she regularly exhibits these perceivable differences? From only one story pair, one should not draw premature conclusions about how Teresa regularly performs personas and stances in her two languages. However, if Teresa consistently exhibits these different styles of talking, one might extrapolate that others would perceive her as consistently “different” in each language more generally. I thus describe the discourse patterns across the other ten story pairs Teresa told. If indeed the quantitative patterns of speaker-role inhabitance, interlocutory, and character strategies are consistent across her corpus, one can speculate that listeners might form similar impressions of her from listening to other stories.8 Tables presenting the quantitative results appear in appendix D. As with analyses of the story pair described above, Teresa is generally engaged in much interlocutory and character performance in both languages (See table D.1). In some sense, Teresa is able to deploy verbal resources to present somewhat comparable sets of speaker-role perspectives. However, these similarities are relative. Teresa still speaks more often in the narrator role in Portuguese and more in the interlocutory role in French. In other words, she may consistently display greater engagement in French than in Portuguese. When speaking in her own here-and-now voice as an interlocutor-narrator, Teresa consistently uses a more familiar or vulgar register of speech in French (table D.2). When experienced and perceived through local ideologies that link ways of speaking and persona, this means she may regularly be perceived by others and experience herself as more “aggressive” in French than in Portuguese, and more reserved or polite in Portuguese. We can also determine the different devices and strategies Teresa consistently uses to present her here-and-now persona in both languages, as shown in table D.3. As in the story pair that listeners heard, she continues to use a greater proportion and frequency of quantifying intensifiers and parentheticals in Portuguese. She uses shifts to a lower register, appeals to a second person, interjections, and discourse markers more in French. This difference indicates

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that she systematically uses a different and wider set of interlocutory strategies in French throughout the interview. Just as Labov (1972b) compared the complexity of evaluative devices used by children of different ages and social groups, one could argue that these differences show that Teresa has access to and uses a more complex, developed set of interlocutory devices in French. Whether this results from Teresa’s linguistic ability in each language, her sense of entitlement to adopt equivalent personas and stances in each language, or broader French and Portuguee norms of affective display, it nonetheless is likely to have consequences for the discrepancy in persona and stance that she and others may report. Finally, throughout her corpus, Teresa consistently quotes all characters using more familiar and vulgar speech in French (Table D.4). This trend is particularly marked for how she quotes herself as a character (table D.5), as the type to use more familiar and vulgar speech. We also see this trend, though perhaps less pronounced, in how she quotes other characters (table D.6). Given that listeners heard a story pair with patterns that are relatively representative of Teresa’s larger corpus, one can speculate that listeners would form similar impressions of her in each language from hearing other story pairs from her corpus. By examining the case of this one individual speaker through these three different methodological lenses, we see more clearly than was possible with the group-level analyses how one person’s particular kinds of language use are directly related to her own and to others’ experiences of that usage. Together, these three different perspectives allow us to see the multiple ways in which her difference in French and Portuguese manifest themselves “objectively” (in language patterns that index voicing), and “subjectively” (in her self-experience and others’ impressions of her). When discussing individually creative use of more widely shared linguistic and cultural forms, one does not want to argue that a single speaker, such as Teresa is representative of Luso-descendants, or even of the sample of twentythree women in the present study. So that one can see how different people from a similar background make their own creative use of similar resources, in chapter 9, I explore a second individual case. 1

Interestingly, as a university graduate, Teresa could insist that unknown others address her with a variety of honorifics in Portuguese. As the daughter of less educated migrants, she never seemed to expect, or any express any desire to receive these. 2 We can refine this analysis further, as these three roles can be performed alone, or simultaneously "double-voiced"(Bakhtin 1981) with the other two roles. This allows us to see how much she interweaves perspectives, or presents them separately.

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Table 8.7 Proportions of all clauses in each speaker role:

Narrator Narrator/Interlocutor Interlocutor Character Narrator/Character Interlocutor/Character Totals

French 20.0 (n = 51) 14.0 (n = 37) 20.0 (n = 51) 39.0 (n = 99) 3.0 (n = 8) 4.0 (n = 11) 100.0 (n = 257)

Portuguese 26.0 (n = 44) 16.0 (n = 27) 15.0 (n = 26) 36.0 (n = 60) 7.0 (n = 11) 0.0 (n = 0) 100.0 (n = 168)

Indeed, when analyzed in this manner, one sees the biggest differences in the performances of the pure narrator role where Teresa neutrally tells past events (more in Portuguese) and the pure interlocutor role where Teresa breaks the narrative frame entirely to communicate stance, and rapport (more in French). Furthermore, she performs character speech differently— engaging in more indirect quotation in Portuguese (NC), more direct quotation in French (C), and more combined interlocutory-character speech in French, where she shows her current assessment of reported speech. Overall, this more precise analysis of speaker roles shows more specifically how Teresa may come across to listeners as both more engaged in French than in Portuguese, in the narrating and narrated events. 3 Perhaps she is alluding to the stereotype of Germans as Nazis or white supremacists. 4 See Van Dijk (1987) for a discussion of how, in discussing race in many urban North American and European contexts, speakers are faced with the interactional challenge of trying to come across as nonracist, that is, making themselves look good, while making racialized others appear in a negative light. 5 Has he accused her of racism for failing to yield the public phone, assuming she would have yielded it to a white person? 6 The one counterexample of this is in her discussion of race (de couleur, noir/preto), as discussed above. 7 Listeners made the distinction between how Teresa must have felt at the time of the incident and how she felt during each of the two tellings. Two listeners noted a discrepancy between these two moments. Two listeners noted that because in neither version did Teresa show any fear, neither telling is likely to be an entirely accurate replica of Teresa’s original experience. These two went on to say that Teresa must have been afraid at the time, although she only presented her anger and indignation in her telling. “On sent pas la peur dans ce qu'elle raconte” (we don't feel the fear in what she says). “C'est passé mais toujours très présent, mais sur le coup elle a dû flipper” (It's over but still present, but at the time she must have flipped out). 8 Of course, all of these story pairs were recorded during the same interview, and thus do not represent how she uses each language across her many life contexts. In ongoing work, I also examine other stories told in more naturalistic contexts.

CHAPTER 9 ISABEL

To provide an example of a second bilingual woman’s individual ways of being “different” in French and Portuguese, in this chapter I discuss materials from Isabel. As done with Teresa, Isabel’s general biographical background is provided, followed by formal analysis of French and Portuguese tellings of the same story, Isabel’s own reports of how she feels using each language, and others’ impressions of her in each language. I will then look at the relationship between the patterns in the analyzed story pair and her larger corpus. I conclude with a synthesis of what attention to both Teresa and Isabel has revealed about the performance and experience of bilingualism and identity more generally. Isabel’s Background Like Teresa, I met Isabel at an association for the promotion of a “modern” image of Portuguese language and culture. I had met her several times before through the association, and she happily volunteered to be interviewed. At the time of her interview, Isabel was twenty-three years old. She and her older sister were born in the rural northeast of Portugal, in the region of Trás-osMontes. Isabel’s parents left her in Portugal in the care of her godparents until the age of five. Subsequently, Isabel has lived in France, and has spent all her summers in her village of origin. Like Teresa, relative to her parents, both Isabel and her sister experienced upward social mobility. At the time of the interview, Isabel was pursuing a degree in journalism, and her sister a master’s in international relations. Both parents left school at the age of ten, to begin working. Both can read and write in Portuguese. They immigrated to France as young adults, soon after Isabel’s birth. Her parents took up residence in Paris, where her father worked as a carpenter and her mother as a maid. They learned oral French through immersion. Her mother has greater skill in French and a “better accent” than her father, because she has had more extensive contact with French through her work. Isabel remarks that her parents inadvertently mix the two languages. Like Teresa, her family’s linguistic and cultural background has become a legacy that she struggles to honor and surpass.

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Isabel’s first language was Portuguese, learned as a child in Portugal. As she lived with her godparents in Portugal, she came to think of them as her “real” parents. She only learned French when she moved to France, at age five. This move to France was traumatic, as she recalls feeling that her biological parents were strangers to her. As she puts it, something “broke” in her. Consequently, she initially refused to learn French. She remembers that her parents were very concerned that she might not learn French, and they shifted the home language to French “to make it go in.” In her words, she had to “forget” Portugal and some Portuguese to “integrate” in France. Indeed, at home in France, Isabel’s family has progressively spoken more French together over the years. Thus, over time, French has taken up a greater presence in her life. However, Portuguese is still a language that Isabel values and speaks on a regular basis. When she and her family return to Portugal each summer, they all make a concerted effort to switch to Portuguese. For Isabel, speaking French in Portugal is a sign of disrespect and ostentation. That said, her immediate family might still occasionally lapse into French when alone. However, because in Portugal most of Isabel’s friends and family speak only Portuguese, Isabel and her parents avoid using French in front of them as much as possible. Through these regular stays in Portugal, and formal Portuguese instruction in France, Isabel has maintained and further developed her Portuguese. Through primary and middle school, she took afternoon and weekend Portuguese classes. At one point she remembered resenting the extra time spent in these language classes, but later realized, “It’s a necessity, it’s your language, it’s your roots . . . I couldn’t see myself leaving behind my language.” In high school, she went to the Portuguese section of an international high school. There she was able to complete the international version of the high school leaving exam that would give her access to universities in either France or Portugal. Like Teresa, throughout her education, she has aspired to equal, comparable, monolingual-like competence in both languages. Isabel believes she should be able to use each language equally well for all formal and informal activities. To her, Portuguese is a complete expressive system in which she should be able to accomplish the same feats as in French. There are no hard things that I couldn’t do in Portuguese . . . I studied for that, to really be able to use Portuguese, really as you’re supposed to, y’know. . . because that’s the goal . . . to be able to use it all the time when you can . . . when you need to.

The ultimate test of her Portuguese comes when she returns to Portugal and is thoroughly immersed in Portuguese monolingual contexts.

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Because using Portuguese in Portugal represents a duty to her origins and to her monolingual Portuguese friends and kin, Isabel has an ambivalent relationship to the language practices of some other LDs and migrants. On the one hand, Isabel feels solidarity with other LDs because of their shared experiences, many of whom are her closest friends in France. They indeed speak mostly French together in France, because it’s “easier, except when we really want to speak Portuguese, or it comes out . . . because you have that possibility, when you have someone Portuguese in front of you, if at some time you want to say a Portuguese word, you can.” With LDs in France, Isabel therefore accepts that French is the matrix language, with Portuguese interspersed for expressive purposes. On the other hand, she objects to LDs’ use of French in Portugal, which she no longer interprets as a matter of habit or facility. When LDs speak French in Portugal, Isabel sees this as denial of their language, “double culture,” and roots. I didn’t like them because they didn’t speak Portuguese . . . it seems like they don’t want to learn, and that turned me off, because I said to myself, “hold on . . . we’re basically Portuguese . . . even if you’re born abroad, but you have a double culture . . . you are of Portuguese origins, so you shouldn’t deny your language. You’ve you’ve already got the possibility of being bilingual why not . . . take advantage of it, of this possibility, of this advantage.”

She quotes her disgust with the ostentatious hybridity of LDs who use French in Portugal: “you’ve got some who think they can do anything. They speak French all the time . . . It doesn’t look good. It comes across as pretentious . . . like you’re saying ‘I’m forgetting my language, but I don’t give a damn.’” Unlike them, at least she and her family “make the effort.” She therefore appeals to a similar set of beliefs about language and identity as those described in chapter 3. Like Teresa, she believes Luso-descendants should speak Portuguese without detectable traces of French. Portuguese is a hereditary possession, and through its proper, public use, one displays one’s loyalty to this patrimony. If this usage is imperfect, this imperfection should be overcome through education and effort. Because of their greater access to education, Isabel believes that LDs should speak more standard versions of both languages than do their parents. Isabel used to dream of moving back to Portugal, until she reached late adolescence. However, her conception of herself and of what she calls the Portuguese “mentality” have changed so that she no longer can envision living in Portugal. Unlike many Luso-descendants, she currently feels that she’s too “integrated” in urban France to adapt to life in rural Portugal. She believes that in rural Portugal her personal freedom would be restricted. “You realize because you get older . . . you have another mentality . . . I have a hard time seeing myself now living in my little corner with the mentality that I have.” In her

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words, this Portuguese “mentality” is not “retarded” but “behind” France, particularly in terms of expectations for young women. “I’ve adopted the life from here. I really integrated myself. For me, it’s difficult now to return to Portugal . . . When I was young it didn’t bother me at all, but now it’s true that I don’t have the same lifestyle at all.” In fact, she reports that when in Portugal, her parents also take on this restrictive mentality. Concerned about the family’s local reputation, they suddenly object to her socializing with young men. They have this dread of the reputation of the family name, so . . . no screwing up, because you always have the reputation that’s behind . . . “but if ever something happens it will be, it’s my daughter, so it will be my name that will be stained,” . . . my parents would say to me, “nobody can have anything to say about you.” . . . I say, “Let them talk, fuck, I don’t give a shit. They’ll say what they want, eh. I have my conscience for me.”

Here she tries to assert her distance from this mentality and her ability to defy it. Her “French mentality” talks back to the ambient “Portuguese mentality.” Although her self-quotation in this utterance takes on a rebellious tone, she describes how she must ultimately succumb when in Portugal, forced to behave in a way that she describes as alien. Here we see how Isabel sets herself apart from this “mentality” and those who hold it, while being forced to submit to it. To be true to who she feels she has become, Isabel believes she is better off in France. She currently envisions her life in urban France, with her longterm French boyfriend. Despite this, she remains nostalgically attached to the Portugal of her childhood. Like Teresa, she wants her boyfriend and future children to learn Portuguese and go to Portugal on a regular basis. From this discussion of Isabel’s life encounters with both languages and countries, we appreciate the contexts and personas that French and Portuguese might index for her. French is the language and France the place that she initially rejected when she arrived as a child. She has since grown up in Paris of working-class, ethnically marked parents. But through her contacts with French-speaking peers and French schooling, French has become the language of her social and socioeconomic autonomy from her family and its origins. Like Teresa, she also has middle-class aspirations, which she hopes a degree in journalism will help secure. However, along with these aspirations for upward mobility, she does not want to be perceived as putting on bourgeois airs—she is still young and hip. Portuguese/Portugal evokes for her an idealized nostalgia of her earliest years. And yet she also seems to see Portugal and Portuguese as embodying a “mentality” she has moved away from. Nevertheless, she still aspires to speak the standard Portuguese she learned in school, so that she can pass as a nonmigrant in Portugal, and blend in with peers of her age in her Portuguese village during vacations. Therefore her goals in Portuguese include sounding different

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from other émigrés/LDs and speaking standard enough Portuguese that those in Portugal will see her as having surpassed her parents’ modest socioeconomic-linguistic roots. She also seeks to maintain her connections to her origins and remaining family and friends in Portugal and to pass discretely as authentically Portuguese with her Portuguese family, friends, and people she might encounter in public situations. She fears that there are dimensions of her perceived greater freedom of life in French/France that do not translate well into her life in Portugal/Portuguese. Data Analysis With this biographical and attitudinal background in mind, we now turn to Isabel’s actual use of French and Portuguese, and the personas and stances she enacts in narratives told in both languages. As with Teresa, this material is presented in three ways: (1) examining an example of a story she told in both languages, (2) relating that formal analysis to her own comments about how she felt in both languages, and (3) bringing to bear reactions of listeners who heard audio-recordings of both stories. Interview Context Isabel knew both of the interviewers informally from an association for LDs. Isabel spoke freely and appeared at ease throughout all parts of the interview. During the follow-up interview, Isabel told me that many of the stories she told she would otherwise “only tell to good girlfriends.” Indeed, one of the interviewers reported to me her surprise at the extent of Isabel’s selfdisclosure. From these remarks, we may infer that even if these stories were not “naturally occurring” in the strictest sense, Isabel was very comfortable and spoke spontaneously throughout the interview. Story Pair Told in Both Languages The following story pair was told approximately halfway through each storytelling session, in response to the request for a bad experience in Portugal with a stranger. As with Teresa, I present both coded versions, in the original and in translation, with comparable segments appearing side-by-side. These transcripts appear in appendix E. Formal Analysis As we saw with Teresa’s story pair, the plots of the two tellings are very similar, the actual events and sequence being virtually identical. In both languages, Isabel has a maddening encounter with a postal employee; in both she gets angry; in both the postal employee presents Isabel with a list of bureaucratic obstacles to getting money from her account. In both she describes not having

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her national identity card.1 In French, however, the bureaucrat speaks twice, whereas in Portuguese she only speaks once. But these differences in the actual structure or progression of events are relatively slight. Although roughly the same events and characters are present in both versions, how she presents and enacts them is quite different. Speaker Role Inhabitance Like Teresa and the larger corpus of speakers, Isabel speaks far more as a narrator in Portuguese, and more as an interlocutor and character in French (see table 9.1).2 Table 9.1 Proportions of clauses in each speaker role

Narrator Interlocutor Character Total number of clauses

French 25 (n = 37) 46 (n = 71) 41 (n = 61) 100 (n = 148)

Portuguese 52 (n = 38) 42 (n = 31) 39 (n = 29) 100 (n = 73)

Isabel uses a much greater amount of speech that appeals to the interviewer, asserts her affect, or indexes socially marked personas. In terms of character speech, in the French version, throughout this story, many of the events in the French telling are replayed in direct discourse as conversational exchanges. Given how much higher Isabel’s proportions of character and interlocutory speech are in the French version, one would predict that the French would come across as more involved and animated. This will be confirmed when we consult the listeners’ responses. Although one can see these patterns of role occupancy throughout the two tellings, one can also focus on how they emerge in particular segments, such as in episode 4 (see coded transcript in appendix E). Both excerpts show alternation among speaker roles. The Portuguese is rendered in narrator, narrator-character, and some interlocutory speech (one parenthetical, one intensifier, and one shift to a higher register). The French includes more direct quotation, rather than indirect quotation of her interior monologue, and more (six) interlocutory instances. As this event clearly occurred originally in Portuguese, in Portugal, it is noteworthy that Isabel quotes her characters more in the language in which the event did not occur. One also sees similar role patterns in a comparison of French and Portuguese versions of episode 8, shown in appendix E. As with the previous ex-

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cerpt from episode 4, both versions combine the three roles, using straight narrative, character performance, and current commentary. However, character and interlocutor roles are less prominent in Portuguese. In the Portuguese, it is clear that Isabel is displeased about what happened, as she breaks into an interlocutory parenthetical, complaining that “they don’t know how to help.” It is nevertheless noteworthy that this is the point at which the interviewer speaks up, asking for more elaboration, specifically requesting that Isabel indicate further how she got angry, what she felt, and what she said. The interviewer is essentially requesting more character performance and interlocutory engagement than Isabel has provided up to this point. Isabel responds by partially performing what she, as a character, said to the bureaucrat. Here we see her hesitate over how fully to enact this exchange—in directly or indirectly quoted discourse. However, even with this somewhat prompted elaboration, the character and interlocutory performances remain far less elaborated and extensive than in French. In contrast to the Portuguese, in the French, unprompted, she moves into an extended quoted replay of how she spoke to the bureaucrat. Here, her interlocutory parenthetical is a much more biting criticism of “them” and “their” technological incompetence. In this way, we see systematically, the differences in how extensively she performs the different roles in her two languages in specific segments of the story, as well as more globally. Registers in the Mouth of Isabel’s Here-and-Now Self: Interlocutor/Narrator Speech In addition to a difference in the extensiveness of speaker role performance in the two languages, one also notes a difference in the speech levels or registers she distributes across the different speaker roles, both when speaking as a here-and-now interlocutor and narrator, and when speaking for the different characters. Like Teresa, as a narrator-interlocutor, Isabel resorts to far more colloquial extremes in French than in Portuguese, using more familiar and vulgar speech forms. In the excerpts below, I have provided examples from thoughout both tellings of her contrasting register use in French and Portuguese. The underlined segments represent the item to be compared across versions. As opposed to quantitative comparison, here we see the nonequivalent registers for the same referent. Compare, for example, how she describes the bureaucrats in the two versions. In Portuguese, Isabel-as-interlocutor calls them desagradáveis (unpleasant)—a very polite, even formal way of expressing her dislike. In her characterization of the postal employees, Isabel presents us with an impersonally defined group of officious functionaries.

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Excerpt 9.1 French versus Portuguese interlocutory register Portuguese 1. chateei-me mesmo,

French 1. la nana m’a vraiment énervée

2. e as pessoas lá são muito desagradáveis,

2. c’est pourri, quoi, le système, vraiment pourri.

não sabem ajudar , não sabem 3. chateei-me um bocado com com ela

l’administration, euh, c’est c’est des cons, c’est des cons 3. ça m’a pris la tête.

fiquei enervada,

ça m’a particulièrement pompée

enervei-me um bocado

mais j’étais vraiment vénère

English translation of Portuguese 1. I got really bugged,

English translation of French 1.the chick really made me mad

2. and the people there are very unpleasant

2. it stinks, y’know, the system, it really stinks.

they don’t know how to help, they don’t know how

the administration, uh, they’re they’re assholes/idiots, they’re assholes/idiots

3. I got a bit bugged by by her

3. it stressed me out

I got angry.

that particularly stressed me out

I got a bit angry

but I was fuckin’ pissed

At other points in the narrative, she continues to refer to them relatively neutrally—in the third-person, as as pessoas-là (“the people there”) who are muito desgradáveis (“very unpleasant”), sometimes with a null-subject dizemte (“they tell you”) and não sabem ajudar (“they don’t know how to help”). In the middle of the narrative, she still remains vague about the postal employee, with her use of a null-subject. There is only one moment that we even learn that the employee is female: chateei-me um bocado com ela (“I got a little annoyed with her”).Therefore, overall in Portuguese, her register use in her interlocutor-narrator speech remains in a consistently neutral, if somewhat colloquial register. In contrast, throughout the French version, Isabel consistently speaks in a “lower” register in her interlocutory/narrator guise. Her interlocutory description of the bureaucrats appears in a much more familiar register. Although she sometimes designates the “administration” with a third-person plural pronoun as in the Portuguese, her first characterization of the postal employee is not

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just as ela (“her”) but as la nana, the slang, somewhat derogatory term for “woman,” roughly equivalent to “chick/broad.” This interlocutory lexical choice simultaneously indexes her affect, persona, and interpersonal rapport with the interviewer. More specifically, it indexes her negative affect toward the postal employee, her own identity as a slang user (young, hip, irreverent), and her appeal to the interviewer to share her stance toward this character. They are not just unhelpful and unpleasant, but des cons (“assholes/idiots”) (episode 10 in appendix E). She maintains this range of very familiar registers throughout, with her use of c’est pourri, quoi, le système, vraiment pourri (“It stinks, you know, the system, it really stinks”), ça m’a pris la tête . . . oh purée . . . j’étais vraiment vénère . . . ça m’a particulièrement pompée. (it really stressed me out . . . oh frig . . . I was really pissed off . . . that really got to me). In particular, ça m’a pris la tête, roughly translated as “it stressed me out,” is a very familiar expression that indexes both her frustration and her identity as a young, rebellious, possibly suburban, speaker. Her use of vénère, a term from verlan, is a very marked slang style of spoken French, strongly indexically associated with young, suburban speakers. Her register use in these instances may function as indexes of her attitude, locally situated identities, and the rapport she seeks to establish with the interviewer. From these examples, we see that as a narrator and interlocutor, she speaks in a consistently more colloquial register in French. These contrasting French and Portuguese ways of speaking as a here-andnow interlocutory/narrator can be quantified as the percentages of clauses that appear in each style, as shown in table 9.2 below. Table 9.2 Percentages of clauses in different registers in narrator and interlocutory roles Unmarked Familiar High Vulgar Other language Total marked

French 73.6 (n = 64) 13.8 (n = 12) 11.5 (n = 10) 3.4 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 26.4 (n = 23)

Portuguese 81.8 (n = 36) 6.8 (n = 3) 11.4 (n = 5) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 18.2 (n = 8)

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Interlocutory Strategies We thus have seen in the examples that, in addition to register, Isabel uses a different set of interlocutory strategies in each telling. These strategies include parenthetical remarks that completely break from the story line, often combined with appeals to her interviewer with the use of tu the second-person pronoun.3 This strategy in French is perhaps somewhat similar to the use of you in personal narratives in American English (O’Connor 1994). We see this strategy in her preface to her story where she explains upfront to the interviewer what “tu”/you need for bank identification “over there,” as she tries to create a narrative context with which the interviewer might also identify. The proportions of these different interlocutory strategies appear in table 9.3 below. Table 9.3 Interlocutory device proportions

Shifts to familiar Shifts to high Shifts to vulgar Shifts to other language Total register shifts Intensifiers Second person Interjections Discourse markers Parentheticals Laughter Sighs Gasps Total

French 13.9 (n = 16) 11.3 (n = 13) 2.6 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 27.8 (n= 32) 13.0 (n = 15) 10.4 (n = 12) 1.7 (n = 2) 10.4 (n = 12) 36.5 (n = 42) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n=0) 0.0 (n = 0) 100.0 (n = 115)

Portuguese 11.5 (n = 6) 23.1 (n = 12) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 34.6 (n = 18) 26.9 (n = 14) 1.9 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 0) 1.9 (n = 1) 26.9 (n = 14) 7.7 (n = 4) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 100.0 (n = 52)

More specifically, she uses more shifts to a lower register in French, more discourse markers, parentheticals, and appeals to the second-person. In Portu-

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guese, she more frequently uses shifts to a higher register and more intensifiers. One can see further examples of these different strategies in the end of episode 2 and all of episode 3 (in appendix E). Although in both versions Isabel addresses her interlocutor as tu, Isabel more frequently appeals to her interlocutor in the French with this second-person pronoun. This also appears later in the story, where she comments on “their” (the Portuguese) technological backwardness. She again does this when she directly compares how such a scene would never have occurred in France (quand t’arrives . . . si t’as pas). But as with Teresa, it is Isabel’s different kinds of register use that contrast the most sharply in the two versions. From these qualitative and quantitative analyses, we see how Isabel uses different devices in French and Portuguese to display her current attitude, affect, identity, and involvement. Registers of Quoted Characters of Self and Others We can also examine how Isabel performs character roles in French and Portuguese. Unlike in the Portuguese telling, in the French telling, many of the events are replayed in direct quotation, from her conversation with her Portuguese family and godmother (who don’t actually speak any French), to her reported inner speech: bon p’têt’ qu’ils m’ont, mon nom (well maybe they have me, my name.) However, as with Teresa, we can look to see not just how extensively, but in which registers she quotes characters in the two versions. In general, as shown in tables 9.4 and 9.5 below, Isabel quotes characters using more familiar and vulgar speech in French, and more neutral or formal speech in Portuguese, throughout the narrative. Table 9.4 Percentage of all direct quotation in each speech register

All C(haracter) speech Unmarked C Familiar C High C Vulgar C Other language C Marked C total

French 100.0 (n = 55) 67.3 (n = 37) 23.6 (n = 13) 7.3 (n = 4) 1.8 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 0) 32.7 (n = 18)

Portuguese 100.0 (n = 12) 75.0 (n = 9) 0.0 (n = 0) 25.0 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n=0) 25.0 (n = 3)

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However, one can be more specific and examine how she quotes herself versus others in each language. First-person Quotation The overall trend is even more pronounced if we examine how Isabel quotes herself as a character, using higher percentages of familiar and vulgar speech in French, and more formal in Portuguese, shown in table 9.5. Table 9.5 Percentage of direct quotations of self (C1) rendered in each speech register

C 1 all C1 unmarked C1 familiar C1 high C1 vulgar C1 other language C1 marked

French 100.0 (n = 36) 66.7 (n = 24) 22.2 (n = 8) 8.3 (n = 3) 2.8 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 1) 33.3 (n = 12)

Portuguese 100.0 (n = 12) 75.0 (n = 9) 0.0 (n = 0) 25.0 (n = 3) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 25.0 (n = 3)

In Isabel’s reporting of her own speech in the Portuguese version, her only unambiguous direct quotation of herself is her quote of her speech to the teller, “como isto, não é normal” (How/why is this, this isn’t normal), in a neutral speech register. We’re left with her relatively polite frustration with faceless functionaries who presented her once with a series of rigid rules, and then neither budged nor spoke any further. Isabel is obviously still frustrated as she tells the story, but it is not clear how or how much she wants to narratively reevoke the whole scene, and how confrontational she wants to present herself as having been. In Portuguese she never quotes herself swearing at the postal worker. On the other hand, like Teresa, in the French she presents herself as openly aggressive in her self-quotation. In her direct quote of herself to the postal employee, she moves into a very familiar/vulgar register, using the interjection putain (literally “prostitute,” but putain is roughly equivalent in its level of vulgarity and force to “fuck”). Also note her final quote of herself to the bu-

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reaucrat in French, as she storms out of the bank, saying in direct discourse the very familiar “Bon, c’est comme ça, je vais pas me prendre la tête, le jour où j’en aurai besoin euh je vous ferai signe, hein. ” (“Okay, that’s how it is, I’m not gonna let this get to me/stress me out, the day I need it, I’ll let you know, eh.”). In neither version does she successfully obtain the money from her account, but in the French, in part through her more familiar speech register, she ends on a more forceful, irreverent note. As a result of these contrasting strategies, in the Portuguese she seems to end with an almost despairing tone, while in French she essentially gets to have the last word. The underlined segments represent first-person character speech. Excerpt 9.2 Self quotation French versus Portuguese Portuguese 1. disse-lhe que, as coisas que não se fazem assim, que se podia ajudar um bocado: o- a gente quando há um problema . . .são são a administração, são, tenho lá uma conta, normalmente, têm, devem, deviam ter a possibilidade a procurar no –no- nos papéis deles, . . . se há realmente uma conta lá . . . na, na vila . . . não é preciso ir a Lisboa,

French 1. “mais putain, dans vos fichiers, vous avez bien mon nom, euh, il y a pas un aut’ moyen, sans sans être obligé de d’envoyer une lettre à Lisbonne et d’attendre je sais pas combien de temps?”

2. “então, mas como isto ? Não é normal.” ((low))

2. “bon, c’est comme ça , je vais pas me prendre la tête, (.) le jour où j’en aurai besoin euh je vous ferai signe, hein ” English translation of French 1. “fuck, in your files, you must have my name, uh, there isn’t another way, without without having to to send a letter to Lisbon and waiting I dunno how much time?”

English translation of Portuguese 1. I told her that things aren’t done/to be done like that, that if they/he/she could help folks little when there’s a problem . . . you are you are an administration, you are, I have an account, normally s there, you have, you have to, they/you should/had to have the possibility to search in their papers, if there really is an account there . . . in the in the city . . . it isn’t necessary to go to Lisbon, 2. “so, but how/why is this ? It isn’t normal.” ((low))

2. “okay, that’s how it is, I’m not gonna let this get to me/stress me out, (.) the day I need it, I’ll let you know/wave, eh.”

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Third-person Quotation One can also compare the speech registers through which she makes other characters speak. In Portuguese, third-person characters mostly speak in indirect quotation, whereas in French, they speak in direct discourse in a range of speech registers, as shown in table 9.6. Table 9.6 Percentages of other-quotations (C3) in direct discourse rendered in each speech register C 3 all C3 unmarked C3 familiar C3 high C3 vulgar C3 other language C3 marked

French 100.0 (n = 19) 68.4 (n = 13) 26.3 (n = 5) 5.3 (n = 1) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 31.6 (n = 6)

Portuguese 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0)

In Portuguese, only once do the bureaucrats speak, through the voice of this one employee, in indirect discourse.4 This indirect quote of the postal employee comes as an enumeration of the bureaucratic procedures Isabel must undertake: só tendo, só fazendo, só pedindo (“only by having, only by making, only by asking”). By her cumulative repetition of só with a present participle, Isabel could simultaneously communicate to her listener an image of this postal employee as an officious functionary, while indexing Isabel’s cumulative frustration by the list of tasks and obstacles the bureaucrat has presented her. In French, on the other hand, she has the different third-person characters speak back to her character more often, from her Portuguese godmother to the postal employee. Isabel also makes the different third-person characters speak in a way that communicates her own unambiguously scornful attitude. As in Portuguese, the postal employee enumerates for Isabel a similar list of everything she must include in her letter to Lisbon, also using repetition of syntactic structures—here subordinate clauses of what Isabel is to write. However, in the French, she puts the employee’s words in direct discourse with a highpitched voice: Ben, ouais, ben maintenant, il faut écrire à Lisbonne, pour envoyer une lettre en disant que que vous avez un compte à la poste, que vous

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voulez qu’on vous fasse une autre, qu’on vous en fasse un autre (Well, yeah, well now, you have to write to Lisbon, to send a letter saying that that you have an account at the post office, that you want us/them to make you another [fem.], us/them to make you another [masc.]). This same employee speaks a second time in the same directly quoted high-pitched voice: Non, non, c’est pas possible (“No, no, that’s not possible”). By making this character use this high-pitched voice, she makes the character seem like a particular social type (the ridiculous bureaucrat), while she simultaneously communicates her attitude about the character. Through these different styles of quoting herself and others, Isabel creates a very different cast of characters in the two versions. Excerpt 9.3 Quotation of others in French versus Portuguese Portuguese 1. dizem-te logo que agora que (unclear), disse-me logo que agora que só tendo, só fazendo, só pedindo a Lisboa um um novo cartão, não sei quê, não sei quê mais, com o bilhete de identidade que eu não tenho

French 1. elle me dit euh, “ben, ouais, ben, ,maintenant, il faut écrire à Lisbonne, pour envoyer une lettre en disant que (.) que vous avez un compte à la poste, que vous avez perdu le carton, que vous voulez qu’on vous fasse une autre, qu’on vous en fasse un autre”, (.) ((high-pitched)) 2. “non, non, c’est pas possible,”((highpitched))

English translation of Portuguese 1. they tell you right away that (unclear) he/she told me right away that, only by having, only by making, only by asking for a new card from Lisbon blablabla,with the national card that I don’t have

English translation of French 1. she says to me um, “well, yeah, well now, you have to write to Lisbon, to send a letter saying that (.) that you have an account at the post office, that you lost the card, that you want them to make you another, them to make you another one,” (.) ((high-pitched)) 2. “no, no, can’t be done,” ((high-pitched))

Summary of Formal Analysis of Voicing Strategies in Isabel’s Story Pair Thus the formal tools for analyzing voicing through speaker roles reveal that something quite different is going on in these two tellings: They systematically differ in the forms Isabel uses to present and perform characters and events. When comparing the French and Portuguese tellings, Isabel is more consistent in her use of discursive devices that mark high interlocutory involvement in French. She consistently quotes characters in direct discourse. She also speaks in a consistently more colloquial range of registers, in her narrator/interlocutor speech, directed to the interviewer, and speech as the different characters.

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To contextualize and elaborate the cultural significance of the “selves” performed in each, we will now turn to the other two approaches to examining Isabel’s “identities” in French and Portuguese: the effects these performances had on both Isabel and on listeners. Experiences of Self, Context, and Language in French versus Portuguese When asked directly about how she feels using each language, Isabel is quite articulate about what is stable and what changes when she speaks French and Portuguese. Like Teresa, she provides several accounts of the relationship between her languages and experience. At certain points, she seems to indicate that the language in which she speaks is of little consequence for how she feels and who she is. At other points she indicates that speaking each language produces a very different experience for her. Different implicit understandings of referential and pragmatic “meaning” underlie these different accounts. Isabel initially reported that although she was telling the “same” stories, she had a very different “sensation” recounting experiences in each language. In this respect, while noting a (referential?) similarity between the two versions, she highlights that speaking each language gave her a different subjective experience. Like Teresa, in these statements, she seems aware of nonreferential effects of speaking each language. Isabel sometimes explicitly rejects and sometimes embraces a more psychological interpretation of the effects of speaking each language. At some moments during our discussion, Isabel appealed to a belief that the language spoken has little effect on her experience, as language, self, and experience are independent entities. Because language and experience are independent, the language spoken should not affect how one reexperiences a narrated event, whose status is somehow more “real” than any words that would describe it. Each language then merely describes but does not affect the entities it refers to. “Those stories touch me at any rate because these are stories that I would have preferred to never have gone through . . . I think that it’s not the language that’s going to change something about that . . . if you tell them in French or in Portuguese, it’s the same thing . . . you suffer the same way in both languages.” As also reported in chapter 4, Isabel does not attribute the different sensation she first reported as a change in personality. “I don’t change my personality because I speak Portuguese.” In these accounts, entities such as “experience” and “personality” exist independently of language. She does not, however, explicitly reconcile this view with her earlier remarks of each language yielding a different “sensation.” At other moments, however, Isabel discusses how language and experience are completely intertwined for her. Like Teresa, she partially relates this to her nonequivalent vocabulary in her two languages. Her French vocabulary is more flexible, which allows her to tell a story more elaborately:

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“You embroider a little more. You can embellish the story a little, or to give it with details.” Like Teresa, she also remarks on her more familiar or colloquial “vocabulary” in French. Although her Portuguese vocabulary doesn’t limit her ability to speak with friends and family, she feels that she lacks more contemporary, vernacular expressions, especially those used by Portuguese young people. She tries to use such newer expressions, however “there are some expressions that go in, but you have a harder time getting them out.” She tries nevertheless, saying, “It can be done.” In a remark perhaps counterintuitive to the analyst, she remarks that despite her more familiar French vocabulary, French nevertheless feels more impersonal to her. “I have another vocabulary in French, more familiar, but more impersonal.” Isabel’s discussion of her different French and Portuguese “vocabulary” describes each language as a set of resources that let her affiliate with different peer groups as well as yield a different affective connection to her speech and the contexts it evokes. In these accounts, each language does directly influence the quality of the experience it describes. Elaborating on how each language affects her subjective experience, Isabel said more about the different sense of emotional intensity, sincerity, and evocativeness Portuguese affords her, despite her less “hip” vocabulary. “Portuguese touches me a lot more . . . I feel as if I’m back in my childhood.” A story “touches” her more in Portuguese, because it evoked more memories. Speaking Portuguese plunges her into a Portuguese context. “You can be more touched when you tell it in Portuguese . . . I think it’s a whole . . . it remakes the whole context . . . it’s more personal than French . . . it’s true that there’s another sensation in Portuguese than in French . . . Portuguese is really deep inside of you . . . French is more impersonal . . . whereas Portuguese, when you come upon it again, you have a sensation of finding your roots somehow . . . you don’t feel it in the same way . . . it’s true that when I speak Portuguese I have this attachment . . . it’s more personal, more intimate . . . it’s something that’s really deep inside you than when I speak French . . . you don’t feel it in the same way.” Something about this difference in how she speaks each language evokes different contexts and sensations from different parts of her life. In these remarks, Isabel sees languages and experiences as interdependent. With these contrasting accounts, is Isabel contradicting herself? Why is she equivocal about how and whether she is different in French and Portuguese? Perhaps Isabel, like Teresa, has difficulty articulating the role of pragmatic dimensions of talk in psychological and social experience. On the one hand, lived events and personalities may seem to her to be stable entities that should not fluctuate. On the other hand, this notion is belied by the actual impact of different ways of talking in different contexts on her experience of how she feels and who she is. Isabel acknowledges that each language taps into different subjective experiences, without reconciling this with a view of

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language as independent from the concreteness of events and persons. Her self-report echoes these multiple perspectives, without neatly reconciling them. Without consistently being able to account for how and why, Isabel reports that speaking each language produces a different experience for her. Listener Reactions To complement formal analysis and Isabel’s self-reports, we now explore how others perceived Isabel in each language. When I played the two versions of the story to listeners, all agreed the two versions were quite different. As one listener said, “The content, there are many things that are the same, but it’s different, totally different.” No listener spent much time comparing the plots of the two tellings, but they all had much to say about who and how they imagined Isabel to be. Like they did with Teresa, listeners readily interpreted differences they heard between French and Portuguese tellings in psychological or characterological terms more consistently than did Isabel herself. Perceptions of Isabel’s Speech As was apparent for Teresa, listeners’ perceptions of Isabel’s persona and affect are deeply tied up with perceptions of how she speaks. Some of the comments about her are explicitly metalinguistic. Below, we examine how listeners directly addressed these manners of speaking in their own right. We can then compare excerpts of how listeners talked about this difference in her language use. As with Teresa, listeners commented on what her Portuguese revealed about her regional origins and how “well” she spoke—her measured speech contributes to her seeming appropriate and diplomatic in the narrating and narrated events. The listeners thought that the Portuguese-speaking Isabel came from northern Portugal, that she spoke in a neutral, oral register, and that she might even be able to “pass” in Portugal as not being an émigré—again. a feat admired by many Luso-descendants. Some were particularly impressed with her use of specialized vocabulary, such as, titular dum conto (bearer of an account). We will compare this to listeners’ remarks about her French speech. Listeners thought her speech in French made her sound jeune and that it positioned her as a rude, aggressive teenager from the working-class suburbs of Paris. Her French was unmarked by traces of Portuguese. Like with Teresa, Isabel’s quotation of herself cursing at someone is proof of her more general assertiveness. All the listeners were struck by the divergence in her French “level” of language from the Portuguese. They remarked that her French was far more colloquial. All five of the listeners rated her French as being in a much “lower” register. As with Teresa, whereas her Portuguese was rated as being

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somewhere between “everyday” and “everyday-familiar” (four rated it as everyday, one as between everyday and familiar), in French, all heard the register use as somewhere between familiar and vulgar. In fact, listeners reacted to Isabel’s French quite viscerally, as it seemed to evoke a persona all too familiar and recognizable, from which they might have wanted to distance themselves. Note the following two listeners’ highly evaluative discussions of their dislike of Isabel’s speech. They explicitly say that their dislike comes from their own exposure to similar ways of speaking that summon up social types with which they do not want to identify.5 . . . a pretty ill-mannered register, y’know . . . we’d say a vocabulary from the suburbs, in quotes . . . it’s really bottom of the barrel vocabulary . . . it’s a register of vocabulary that I don’t like at all . . . because I I lived in the suburbs for three, four years and um it’s true that I couldn’t have a discussion with a young person without its being, “Fuck, stressed me out, I would a smashed their mugs/kicked their ass,” well, with her it’s it’s the same style . . . in French I like her a lot less than in Portuguese . . . an impolite vocabulary. The girl, I imagine her living um in the northern suburbs of Paris . . . because she uses language, verlan, for one, and then um and um vulgar words . . . all those words make me put her in that category . . . she has a strong personality. . . she really represents . . . teenagers . . . from the suburbs . . . she comes across as a bit vulgar . . . her way of of speaking makes me believe that that she . . . yeah, two, two completely different backgrounds . . . given her language, I don’t think I could have been friends with her . . . I’m falling over . . . I didn’t think she was like that . . . I don’t think she used this, such crude language while speaking with the . . . girl from the administration, with the lady.

One listener did not connect Isabel’s colloquial way of speaking to her social origins. Instead she interpreted Isabel’s cursing as a sign of her affect (anger), rather than as a sign of her social type and location. Indeed, she was not put off, but was amused by Isabel, even erupting into laughter throughout her comments. She criticizes the system ((laugh)) the administration in Portugal with pretty strong words . . . she is more aggressive in French, she is meaner . . . in French she says a little what she thinks, y’know, she says “I was vénère,” well there, she speaks in verlan ((chuckle)) she says she was vénère ((laugh)), she’s angry apparently ((laugh)) . . . she’s more angry too ((laugh)) . . . even in her words, in Portuguese . . . in French I sense her . . . she has more energy in French than in Portuguese.

We see therefore that the listeners did diverge from each other in how they positioned themselves relative to Isabel’s speech, perhaps relative to their own sociolinguistic ambivalences that Isabel’s speech evoked. Discussions of Isabel’s speech are very tied up with discussions of the kind of person she is. This

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difference is tightly bound up with listeners’ more general perceptions of her identity, feelings, and the personas and contexts she conjures up in each language, as will be discussed below. Perceptions of Isabel as a Person Listeners reported that they had the impression that in French and Portuguese, Isabel came across as two completely different speakers, from two different backgrounds, with two different sets of reactions. Portuguese When asked how they imagined her to be, all five listeners characterized the Portuguese Isabel as polite, calm, respectful, and conciliatory. As one said, “She’s the victim ((laugh)) . . . in Portuguese.” Another called her “a super-shy chick.” Another went on to comment on Isabel’s appropriate demeanor: “she seems to me to be a a girl [who is] appropriate to spend time with.” And another listener summed up the image they had of her in the following way: “Very calm, head on her shoulders, a pretty conscientious girl . . . she tries to relativize things . . . and tried to be diplomatic, y’know . . . she is much nicer in Portuguese, let’s say . . . in her way of of asking them.” According to the listeners, based on the Portuguese telling, Isabel made a goodfaith effort to resolve her fight with the postal worker diplomatically. French Listeners had a very different sense of her after hearing the French version. They were quite struck by how differently Isabel and her story came across. In French, they imagined her to be more aggressive, funnier, more explosive, more vulgar and more critical. As one listener reported, “She seems pushier in French . . . less willing to make an effort than in Portuguese . . . she is much . . . meaner in French, eh . . . she’s funnier [in French] . . . she seemed to me to be a girl who won’t let herself be taken, who doesn’t make a lot of effort.” As suggested above, two listeners directly linked perceptions of Isabel as more assertive in French than Portuguese to her language use and to the socially locatable types in France and Portugal that she saw Isabel as incarnating (tough, working-class, Parisian suburbanite teenager versus demure, respectful village girl in Portuguese). . . . completely different, I didn’t imagine her like that...when she speaks in Portuguese . . . we have the impression that she’s not a a girl from the streets. . . who doesn’t hang out at night and all, no, who studies, in fact, I’d say a girl who is studying/going to college, whereas there, when she speaks French, we don’t have that impression at all . . . she’s a suburbanite . . . it’s her way of speaking. she comes across as vulgar . . . so she didn’t let herself be walked on . . . in my opinion . . . I feel like I’m dealing with two different girls . . . one who knows how to behave herself…and in French, no, she lets herself go . . . it comes from her way of speaking . . . her way of speaking

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makes me believe . . . two totally different backgrounds . . . she has no respect for the person who was in front of her apparently . . . we see well that she’s someone who likes to achieve her ends . . . who doesn’t hold her tongue when she has something to say . . . two different girls . . . completely.

Without appealing to the social locations Isabel’s speech conjured up, another listener interpreted Isabel’s difference in a more psychological or temperamental idiom, talking about Isabel’s different “personalities”: reserved in Portuguese and funny and energetic in French. I can tell you that it’s, well okay it’s a different personality, y’know . . . the language . . . we have the impression that this girl is is very impulsive very uh very hyped up, y’know . . . she says what she thinks and all . . . I don’t see too much the same person, y’know . . . I like her calm side in Portuguese and her way of being funny in French.

Therefore, we see that listeners formed a radically different impression of the kind of person Isabel must be, from these two tellings: restrained and polite in Portuguese; over-the-top, critical, and assertive in French. Listeners connected this difference to the social types and locations she seemed to incarnate, as well as to more psychological tropes, like the “personality” and “feelings” she displays. Perceptions of Other Characters in Isabel’s Story We can also compare how listeners perceived the other main character in the story of the postal worker. In the Portuguese, the postal worker was not described in positive terms—listeners thought this character was unhelpful, uncooperative, and incompetent. He/she was also described as a particular socially locatable type of bureaucrat. One described him as “the stereotyped desciption of the bureaucrat . . . he doesn’t take initiative to try to help her, does his work, period, that’s it, who leaves at 5:00 p.m.” Another listener evoked this bureaucratic social type as such, “A real cretin, that one ((both laugh)) . . . he’s very suit and tie, I mean he only occupied himself doing his job, period.” In French, these negative perceptions of the postal worker were greatly heightened. She was still perceived to be a disagreeable bureaucrat. For example, listeners commented on her lack of initiative and incompetence. One listener said, “She shows her to us as an incompetent, y’know . . . who doesn’t know how to do her work, who is there, sitting in her chair in front of her desk, watching flies go by, y’know.” However, listeners described her as more ridiculous, even hysterical, incompetent, and the scene more like a loud fight. Another commented, “I have the impression that it’s . . . a very angry chick, and um hysterical.”

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In sum, listeners perceived the postal worker in consistently different manners in French and Portuguese tellings. Local stereotypes of bureaucrats are apparent in both. However, the postal worker is presented as more unpleasant and even antagonistic in French. We thus see from these comments, how listeners imagined very different types of people in the French and Portuguese tellings. Affecive Intensity As I discussed with Teresa, listeners’ sense of a speaker’s persona and affect are often closely linked. Listeners generally found that Isabel was telling a bad memory in both languages, but in quite different ways. Several listeners commented that she seemed less engaged in the Portuguese telling, both in the narrating and narrated events. Listeners commented on the muted presentation of the narration, and limited amount of reliving of the narrated event. “She tells us with a fair amount of detachment.”Another said, “I don’t feel like she’s she’s living this situation. ((laugh)) she tells it simply and in a neutral way . . . in my opinion, she’s already resolved the situation at that time, I dunno . . . she says the essential, she stops there.” The listeners themselves tried to speculate about why Isabel was more reserved in the Portuguese telling. One listener wondered aloud whether Isabel’s lesser intensity in Portuguese comes from her reluctance to appear too critical in Portuguese: “She doesn’t dare to criticize. I don’t know why she doesn’t do it . . . maybe because she’s not able to in Portuguese, she maybe can’t express all her, all her feelings, and all her ideas.” In other words, this listener asked whether Isabel’s more contained Portuguese affective display results from Isabel’s not feeling entitled or not feeling linguistically able to appear critical in Portuguese. Regardless of the reason, listeners linked their perception of Isabel’s muted affective state to their perception of her as a calmer person. “In Portuguese she is calm, both, but I see . . . not too much the same person, y’know . . . I like her calm side in Portuguese . . . she’s a cool girl, y’know ((laugh.)).” One listener fused her perception of Isabel the calm narrator/interlocutor and Isabel the calm, passive character. Here we see her description of Isabel’s affect at the time of the telling: She seems to be patient . . . very peaceful . . . rarely gets mad . . . apparently . . . I don’t know if it’s because she tells it now . . . at this moment, but she got mad, but you can’t hear it in her intonation, because she always speaks in a neutral way, she always speaks on the same, let’s say on the same line . . . she doesn’t get excited . . . but I don’t think that she’s a person who who goes in somewhere and starts yelling at everyone . . . I see her calm, very helpless maybe.

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We then see how this listener links this image of Isabel’s affect as the narrator/interlocutor to the image of Isabel’s affective stance as the character in the story. “At the time when that happened to her, well, she didn’t know what to do . . . she easily gave up, I think she said to herself, ‘I gotta go to Lisbon, with them, I have no choice’ . . . as if . . . she let herself be a bit walked on, or in the way of of telling it.” Thus from these comments, we see that listeners perceived her negative affect in the Portuguese telling, but that it came across to them as somewhat muted. Listeners perceived Isabel to be more affectively engaged in French than in Portuguese, in both narrating and narrated events: “She lives her thing a little more, y’see . . . she really explodes . . . she shows her anger well . . . it’s still a bad memory . . . but she is less flat . . . I think it’s more alive.” As opposed to the Portuguese telling, where one listener noted Isabel’s relative absence of criticism, in French, “She gives her opinion, she criticizes . . . she’s more critical, she says what she thinks . . . she is more angry too ((laugh)).” Listeners commented on some of the discursive strategies Isabel uses that create different senses of her affective intensity in each version, such as the extensiveness of quotation and register. She doesn’t tell it in detail, she doesn’t say, “I told her that, she told me that, so I answered her that . . .” so we are hungry for more . . . she didn’t feel like um dwelling on it, in my opinion . . . she’s much less into it . . . it’s a bad memory that still remains a bad memory . . . she just tells the facts . . . we have a hard time imagining it. [she] criticizes well . . . it blows up 6 . . . we see that she’s pretty angry, y’know...she redoes the dialogue, she reimagines the dialogue of the functionary and then she she takes she takes on the voice of the functionary. . . y’know. In fact, and then this little high tone . . . which which emphasizes . . . the critical aspect . . . the ironical aspect . . . she’s mean there . . . she involves herself more . . . maybe the fact that she used . . . more vulgar words . . . maybe, but we see that that she has got it in her belly . . . in French we see well that that she’s very angry and all.

With these remarks, we see listeners’ consistent perception of her as displaying greater affective intensity in French than in Portuguese. As opposed to the Portuguese, this was linked to her more familiar language use and greater “reliving” (“reimagining the dialogue”) in the French. Listeners thus used similar types of signs to infer persona and affect. As with Teresa, combining formal analysis of Isabel’s actual language use, her own comments about her speech in each language, and others’ reactions to that usage, we have a complex view of bilingual speech and its relationship to participants’ subjective experiences and perceptions.

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Isabel’s Overall Profile As was done for Teresa, one would want to know how representative the patterns in the above story pair are of her language use throughout her corpus (see appendix F for tables of quantitative results). Indeed, beyond this story pair, throughout her corpus, Isabel is consistently more narrator focused in Portuguese, and more character and interlocutor focused in French (see table F.1). One might speculate that she would consistently be perceived to be more engaged in French than in Portuguese. These trends are shown in the tables in appendix F. Similarly, she consistently uses more familiar and vulgar speech in the interlocutor-narrator frame in French across her corpus (see table F.2). Consequently, if listeners had heard other story pairs, they may still have perceived her as more young/rebellious/hip/irreverent in French than in Portuguese. She also uses the same consistently different proportions of interlocutory devices in both languages (see table F.3). As we saw for the larger corpus, she consistently quotes herself more in familiar and vulgar registers in French than in Portuguese (see table F.5). This pattern is less pronounced for third-person characters (table F.6), in part because we are examining percentages, rather than frequencies. This may also be because, as we saw for the larger corpus, she may be more willing to quote others using familiar Portuguese language than she is to quote herself doing so. Given the consistency of her discourse patterns in both languages throughout her corpus, one might expect that listeners would react to other story pairs similarly to how they reacted to the story discussed above. Conclusion From case analyses of Teresa and Isabel, we have explored in detail how the more general trends discussed in chapters 4–7 matter for specific individuals. We related speakers’ sociolinguistic backgrounds, textual examples of how two women presented the “same” story in two languages, their own reports of their experiences of self in each language, others’ reactions to their narrative presentations of self in each language in specific story pairs, and finally the relationship between speakers’ presentations of self in individual story pairs to their more general patterns of presentations of self in each language throughout their respective corpora. These women’s particular discursive strategies for presenting selves and others were palpable to them and to listeners. Even if the speakers themselves struggled to explain the nature of the difference, both recognized that something clearly different happens when they move between languages. Listeners were less equivocal than speakers. They were far quicker to interpret Isabel’s and Teresa’s different ways of speaking as evidence of their being “different people” in French and Portuguese tellings. To listeners, harsh language, for

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example, became evidence of the speaker’s intrinsic harshness, and the kind of socioculturally recognizable “type” she was seen to incarnate. Listeners could not help but hear the contrasting indexical cues present in the two tellings as evidence of the contexts, “personalities,” and reactions such cues typically presuppose and entail. In this way, to listeners’ ears, the speakers were creatively transformed into different types of person by virtue of using such forms. Examining these single speakers through the lenses of the different approaches allowed us to see how a specific person’s formally identifiable patterns of language use are implicated in and parallel speakers’ and listeners’ situated experiences and interpretations of those forms. Through this multipronged analysis, we saw how Teresa and Isabel became “different people” in French and Portuguese. Similarities in Isabel’s and Teresa’s French versus Portuguese Narrative Performances These two womens’ verbally mediated identities differ along similar lines. Both women’s stories involved commentaries on and performances of both others’ and their own identities in French and Portuguese sociocultural landscapes. For Teresa, both versions of her story indirectly took issue with her own ethnic identity (Portuguese, French, white), relative to that of another ethnic minority (black). One major difference between her French and Portuguese tellings, however, was the extent to which she performed her own self-assertion in the narrated event. In French, she “went down to his level,” using a speech register that resembled his. In so doing, she inhabited the same type of aggressive, suburban, ethnically marked persona as he was made to incarnate. In Portuguese, on the other hand, she did not reciprocate his coarseness. She did not take on equivalently assertive Portuguese voices. Instead, she remained a polite victim of verbal abuse, from a character whose social background no longer evoked disaffected minorities from the Parisian suburbs. Instead, the closest persona she could evoke for him was the persona of the uncultivated, rural hick. She did not and perhaps could not evoke French urban personas and their associated ways of speaking—for herself and for others—in Portuguese. Similarly, both versions of Isabel’s story indirectly took issue with her identity as a vacationing LD in Portugal, lacking official proof of Portuguese identity. In the Portuguese telling, she performed the persona of a polite, resourceless victim, without identity documents, confronted with the unfamiliar procedures of Portuguese bureaucracy. She did not perform her French stance of rebellious, urban/suburban outrage with her interviewer or in the narrated story itself. On the other hand, in French, she criticized Portugal through the voice of French (sub)urban, adolescent revolt. Her critique of Portugual only

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emerged through this set of French voices. She does not use comparably critical voices in Portuguese. To summarize, in French, both Teresa and Isabel speak through colloquial registers that mark them as part of the landscape of urban and suburban French youth culture. Indeed, associated with this different way of speaking, both take on more critical, irreverent stances in their French tellings, cursing at other characters. In Portuguese, they assume a more deferential, less empowered stance to convey their displeasure with other characters in the narrated events. Listeners indeed reported that speakers seemed to se laisser faire—let themselves be taken or pushed around—more in Portuguese, and seemed to s’affirmer—stand up—more for themselves in French. When speakers use or listeners hear the other language, new contexts are instantiated, in which different types of performable interactions, values, and personas are then evoked. Explanations of their differences in French versus Portuguese How to account for these divergences? One might ask about the role of linguistic competence in producing these differences. Could it be, for example, that Teresa and Isabel simply do not know how to swear, criticize, and otherwise assert themselves in Portuguese, as they do in French? Although these speakers are fluent bilinguals, they may not productively master equivalent registers in French and Portuguese, and may indeed have greater control over their self-presentations in French than in Portuguese contexts in general. However, as discussed in chapter 6, their ability to use particular registers is not a context-free skill. Teresa and Isabel have learned and used both languages in a variety of sociolinguistically complex contexts in both France and Portugal. The socially meaningful registers they have learned and have used both result from and have consequences for the social identities they perform. The differences can then be understood as not only a question of the identities they are able to perform, but simultaneously of the social identities that would be appropriate for them to perform in French and Portuguese sociolinguistic contexts. They may not be at liberty to perform the persona of an aggressive, outspoken urban or suburban youth in Portuguese contexts. The difference in their register usage, or “vocabulary,” may then in part result from their own awareness that in their Portuguese incarnations as young women from the countryside, offspring of parents of modest social origin, they can only permit themselves so much. Performances of more socially daring personas and characters who curse and condescend might reflect poorly on these women’s need to preserve locally valued images as honorable young women whose (verbal and nonverbal) comportment is beyond reproach. Whether it is a question of ability and/or entitlement, in either case the difference in their usage of these registers affects the range of personas they enact in each language or, effectively, who they can be in French and Portuguese. Therefore

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it is not simply a question of their decontextualized mastery of linguistic resources. Teresa’s and Isabel’s available French versus Portuguese linguistic resources are inherently indexes of social resources and identities. How they speak each language becomes associated with the multiple, often contradictory, contexts in which these women have found themselves. In this way, both women are at a loss to speak “from the same place,” with equivalent verbal resources and the voices those index in their two languages (Blommaert 2005). In interaction with bilingual interviewers who share these multiple linguistically invokable cultural frames and personas, Teresa’s and Isabel’s differences emerge as a function of their nonequivalent positions in the contexts associated with their two languages. Their use of French and Portuguese sociolinguistic resources both results from and reinforces these nonequivalent positions and personas. Two Languages, Two Personalities? So can we conclude that these women have different “personalities” in their two languages? We indeed saw clearly identifiable, systematic differences in these women’s discursive patterns of presenting self and others in French and Portuguese. Can one demonstrate a definitive, or even causal relation between these women’s “objectively” different ways of talking and different “personalities”? It would be misleading to call such patterns merely surface reflections of underlying selfhood or personality. I argue that one cannot meaningfully answer questions about what these differences reveal about personality without reference to local language ideologies and their related folk psychologies. Instead of asserting that these formal differences “reveal” differences in who these women “really” are, we have accessed indigenous, “subjective” reports about what these “objective” formal differences mean and the effects they have. As such, there is no perspective-free answer as to whether these women are really different in French and Portuguese. What we have are consistent differences in the women’s patterns of indexical language use, and consistent interpretations of those indexes. The materials from Teresa and Isabel show how experiences of being a particular type of person and perceptions of particular types of persons are, by necessity, indexically mediated. 1 The bilhete de identidade is the most widely accepted form of identification and proof of Portuguese citizenship. Indeed, it would be quite unusual for any Portuguese citizen residing in Portugal not to have this document. Émigrés and Luso-descendants with Portuguese citizenship are also required to have it, but as they spend most of the year abroad, they may be less likely than residents to keep current with Portuguese administrative procedures. Obtaining one’s bilhete de identidade is an example of the kind of encounter with Portuguese bureaucracy that Luso-descendants routinely evoke when they compare French and Portuguese

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bureaucracies. To Luso-descendants, the bilhete de identidade often becomes an index of their legitimated Portuguese identity, and the story of how it was acquired often becomes an index of ambivalence about Portuguese bureaucracy. 2 For greater precision, one can also look at specific role combinations she uses: Table 9.7 Proportions of clauses in each speaker role

Narrator Narrator/Interlocutor Interlocutor Character Narrator/Character Interlocutor/Character Totals

French 14 (n = 20) 10 (n = 15) 35 (n = 52) 37 (n = 55) 1 (n = 2) 3 (n = 4) 100 (n = 148)

Portuguese 22 (n = 16) 11 (n = 8) 27 (n = 20) 16 (n = 12) 19 (n = 14) 4 (n = 3) 100 (n = 73)

Indeed, she speaks much more in the pure narrator role in Portuguese, more in the pure interlocutory role in French, more in pure character speech in French (direct quotation), and more in indirect quotation (narrator-character) in Portuguese. 3 In both tellings, we first see that Isabel and her two interviewers address each other as tu, the informal second-person address form in French and Portuguese. The reciprocal usage of this address form establishes certain baseline expectations for how interviewer and interviewee relate to and talk to each other. This usage indexes a peer relationship and perhaps shared social identities (Brown and Gilman 1960/1972; Morford 1997); for these speakers, they share identities as jeune, as students who in France typically use tu with each other regardless of age, and ultimately as both Luso-descendants. 4 It is precisely for this reason that table 9.6 shows no quotation of others in Portuguese, as only direct quotes were reported therein. 5 Recall Teresa’s evocation of a rude, ethnically marked thug in the previous chapter, along with her attempt to come across to her interviewer as a member of a more refined, reasonable minority. These listeners may also be ambivalent about their own language use and personas. Like Teresa and Isabel, they also are confronted with different language-linked trajectories— away from ethnically and socioeconomically marked suburbs where many grew up, toward greater upward mobility and middle-class aspirations through the French educational system. Indeed, like the original speakers, the listeners were also university students, but of workingclass origins. 6 The French description was ça pète le feu, literally, “it farts fire.”

CHAPTER 10 CONCLUSION

This final chapter summarizes what this work has demonstrated, and asks what the findings reveal more broadly about the relationships between language and identity, beyond the case of French-Portuguese bilinguals. Specifically, I discuss the implications of the present work for methodologies used in the study of language and identity, for the study of the narrative enactment of identity, and for discursive relativity. I conclude by asking how much of what we have found for the speakers described in this book is unique to them, and how much might apply to other groups of speakers, bilingual or monolingual, in sociolinguistically complex contexts. Ultimately, in this chapter, I suggest that the fact that these bilinguals experience themselves and are perceived by others to be “different people” in their two languages comes from their experience of having lived between specific sociolinguistic contexts of two ideologically monolingual nation-states. Synthesis of Findings This book began with quotes from French-Portuguese bilinguals who feel like a different person in their two languages. This oft-reported, rarely empirically explored experience served as my springboard for asking broader questions about the relations between language(s) and different idioms of self-presentation and experience for the same individuals across contexts. I then presented an approach to the relationships among language, identity, and context that accounts for bilinguals’ intuitions of having multiple identities. First arguing that an approach to this question requires a fully articulated theory of how language relates to context, I specifically adopted a perspective inspired by Bakhtin (1981), who described how centrifugal and centripetal forces coexist both through the social diversity across and within particular languages, and for the individual social actor who tries to manage his/her positioning amid the diversity of “voices” of selves and others. Bilinguals’ struggles to position themselves relative to the ambient voices associated with their two languages fall squarely within this purview. Different ways of speaking and different “voices” reciprocally index each other, so that a way of speaking immediately evokes a particular type of person, and a particular type of person is only fully imaginable through his/her

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way of speaking. Voicing is fundamentally about the social semiotics and, more specifically, social indexicality of speech (Agha 2005b; Bauman 2005; Silverstein 1976/1995; Woolard 2004). Advocating attention to bilinguals’ actual discourse and to local understandings of how language and identity summon each other up, I examine the social indexicalities in LDs’ French and Portuguese discursive productions in both languages, to see how different types of locally meaningful personas are concretely produced in real-time speech. I provided the sociolinguistic contexts in which Luso-descendant bilinguals have learned and used French and Portuguese, and the particular identities and contexts their speech evokes in each. Their speech bears the traces of their families’ complex, cross-generational, transnational trajectory from rural poverty in pre-revolutionary Portugal to upwardly mobile urban and suburban, working- and middle-class French. With these different positionings in France/French and Portugal/Portuguese, their speech evokes nonequivalent personas, which are not readily translated. For personal and professional reasons, many have plans to relocate to Portugal as adults. In their struggles to situate themselves in French and Portuguese sociolinguistic spaces, LDs have been socialized to strive for French and Portuguese monolingual norms. They are very aware of the value placed on keeping both languages separate and, regardless of how they may actually speak, they devalue signs of influence from the other language. As such, they strive with difficulty to speak equivalent versions of each language that would allow them to circulate freely between equivalent social locations. Their circulation between and nonequivalent positions in these two ideologically monolingual societies form the backdrop against which their language-specific identities emerge. With that theoretical and ethnographic context in mind, the formal studies were presented that link how LD bilinguals explicitly report their sense of the relations between language and identity, how they use particular voicing strategies through the formal indexical machinery of French and Portuguese to present particular versions of themselves and others, and finally, how others perceive them in each language. These three approaches together showed in a detailed and layered way how these speakers “became” different types of people in French and Portuguese. Multiple Dimensions to the Relationships of Language and Identity The first dimension explored was that of participants’ intuitions about the role of language in their experiences of self and context. Most participants indeed reported that speaking each language gives them a different experience. However, both within and across speakers, people provided varied interpretations of this difference, informed by how people reconciled different beliefs about language with their actual experience of speaking. I investigated the multiple,

CONCLUSION 239

sometimes conflicting understandings of language function that speakers invoked, as they tried to articulate the impact of use of their two languages on context and self, alternating among more referential, pragmatic, and psychological accounts of language function. For example, some participants explained their different experiences with recourse to more psychological accounts of how their “personalities” change. Some situated the source of the experience of difference in the languages themselves. Others appealed to somewhat more interactional explanations. Of note, participants consistently talked about language, identity, and context as neatly separable entities. Similar to Silverstein’s (1981) account on the limits of metapragmatic awareness, participants found it especially hard to articulate the pragmatic effects of their two languages without resorting to referential or psychological explanations. Participants’ accounts should therefore not be taken as simply misguided. These accounts appeal to local beliefs about language that can themselves be consequential for the social and psychological “meanings” of speech. To go beyond these explicit accounts about identity, the second dimension explored was the enactment of identities in two languages. From in-depth examination of how these bilingual participants used the indexical forms of each language in narratives of personal experience in ways that produce consistently different patterns of voicing in French and Portuguese, I was able to determine precisely which dimensions of French-Portuguese bilinguals’ enactments of identity consistently varied and which did not, when language changed. Participants presented stories of personal experience from different speaker role perspectives in their two languages, with nonequivalent speech forms. In both languages, they presented images of themselves and of others as quoted characters at some remove from who they were as here-and-now interlocutors. However, speakers navigated the boundaries between quoted and nonquoted personas differently in their two languages, using quotations in different ways in French and Portuguese. In French, speakers were more willing to use colloquialisms and obscenities in the interlocutor role, and in quotations of themselves in the character role. In Portuguese, they tended to use colloquialisms and obscenities more when quoting others. For example, in the Portuguese version of a story about a fight with their fathers, the only obscenities or marked colloquialisms appeared in the mouths of their quoted father, whereas the Luso-descendant young women spoke “respectfully” both as interlocutors in the interview, and when quoting themselves as the characters of there-and-then daughters. In the French versions of the “same” story”, they would speak to the interviewer more colloquially and quote themselves cursing back at their father. In other words, by being able to quote others, they demonstrated that they were clearly aware of the social meanings of these forms. I argued that participants used these different patterns of

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voicing because of the difference in the types of personas they felt able and entitled to assume in their two languages. These different patterns of voicing underlie participants’ experience of difference in their two languages. The third dimension of identity explored was the uptake of bilinguals’ enacted identities. I sought to determine whether the differences that speakers reported and that were evident in their actual discourse were perceivable to listeners. LD listeners reacted strongly to the differences in French and Portuguese tellings, noting differences that paralleled those found through the first two methodological approaches. Listeners were exquisitely sensitive to how speakers “voiced” different images of self and others as locally recognizable French and Portuguese types. They conjured up very vivid images of speakers, clearly situating recorded speakers and the stories they told in the sociocultural landscape of rural Portugal in Portuguese, and urban France in French. In particular, they reacted very strongly to speakers’ nonequivalent use of speech levels or registers, noting speakers’ greater range of registers used in French than in Portuguese, and noting the very different personas that the different levels summoned up in the two languages. Through the lens of local language ideologies that link ways of speaking to types of people and stances, listeners often perceived speakers as different types of people in French and Portuguese, frequently perceiving the French incarnation to be more aggressive and angry, and perceiving the Portuguese incarnations to be more docile and reserved. For these listeners, sociolinguistic origin, way of speaking, character, and affect were thoroughly intertwined. Listeners also summoned up vivid images of the narrated characters of third-person others that speakers had presented, similarly situated as local French and Portuguese “types,” based on racialized and gendered stereotyped images of others in urban France and rural Portugal. The two sets of tellings of a story drew upon sets of different kinds of performances of culturally and sociolinguistically situated versions of self and others. From the results of this systematic analysis of materials, I demonstrated that LD bilingual women’s reports of feeling different are mirrored by the empirical findings of their different ways of speaking in each language, and by others’ perceptions of them. These patterns of performance of French and Portuguese speaking identities illuminate with marked precision which dimensions of speakers’ verbal displays of self vary and which ones persist across French and Portuguese contexts. As such, this research demonstrates how different sociolinguistic contexts summon up the different identities that people experience, produce, and perceive. With these multiple approaches, it was shown precisely how these bilingual women’s displays of self varied and stayed the same across two specific contexts. In fact, a combination of variation and stability in their languagespecific self-presentations was found. Across speakers, these bilinguals are

CONCLUSION 241

consistently different in the same ways in French and Portuguese. As such, their identities are only partially “emergent.” On the one hand, their identity displays did systematically change as they moved to the other language. On the other hand, there is remarkable stability in the discourse strategies used and different types of identities displayed within each language. Methodological Implications Through use of multiple empirical approaches, which provided convergent evidence, this work showed how “subjective” phenomena are constituted through talk. These different sources of data confirm that participants have embodied something experientially real, both to them and to listeners. By using multiple strategies, one reduces the limitations of any single approach. In this way, one does not rely exclusively on speakers’ talk about their own experiences of language and identity, as discourse-oriented scholars have long noted the limitations of asking people directly about their verbal practices; similarly one does not rely exclusively on comparative percentages of discursive devices as indexes of some identity or stance, without recourse to local interpretations of particular ways of talking. When findings converge as a result of these multiple approaches, one can be more confident that the phenomenon under study is “real” for participants and analysts. With its detailed attention to the forms through which subjective phenomena are enacted, interpreted, and experienced, this work contributes to comparative discussions of identity enactment. Similarly, with its focus on variation, such work can further illuminate how different ways of talking shape the feelings not only of people from distinct groups, but of the same people across contexts. Ultimately, with proper ethnographic grounding, these approaches could be applied to other groups of speakers whose contextually bound, culturally meaningful identities are verbally indexed in ways that are subjectively and intersubjectively felt and interpreted. Implications for Narrative Analysis and Identity In addition to the study of bilingualism and identity, another ambition of this book was to provide a more precise repertoire of tools for understanding the relationships between language and identity more generally. By specifying the key forms through which bilinguals enact identities, this work offers tools for systematically operationalizing Bakhtin’s notions of voicing to study the enactment of identity in narrative more broadly. As provocative as Bakhtin’s writings are, his ideas have proved quite challenging to apply to real-time interaction (Bauman 1992, 2005; Wortham 2001). The approach to voicing offered in this book allows one to see how in telling a story, people must do more than merely describe a series of past events. The comparison of multiple compelling performances of the “same” events by the same speaker demon-

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strates in detail the strategies through which speakers not only represent, but perform and interpret the events they recount. By analyzing a corpus of speakers’ repeated performances of the “same” stories across languages, we have empirical, systematic support for the notion that stories are not faithful reports, straightforwardly tied to a static version of “original” events, whose subsequent narrations differ only by the degree to which they more or less faithfully reproduce those events. The differences in referential content of stories were less salient than the way speakers used consistently different pragmatic, semiotic resources in their two languages to present themselves and others as particular types of people. As such this framework contributes more generally to linguistically grounded analyses of self and identity. It shows how speakers assume specific interactional and culturally recognized positions through the use of specific verbal devices within and across the multiple speech event contexts of a narrative. Specifically, I demonstrated precisely how speakers’ narrative enactments of identity involve performance of and commentary upon multiple socially and spatiotemporally locatable voices of selves and others. The coding scheme for speaker roles presented here allows one to systematize the notion that personal storytelling is a complex interactional feat, in which speakers display stances toward an audience, toward the events recounted, and toward characters that embody culturally recognized types of contexts and persons. That is, as speakers try to persuade their audiences that they and relevant others are and were particular kinds of persons, they must simultaneously present themselves as (1) particular kinds of persons in the here-and-now of the event of narration in the interlocutor role, (2) as narrators, (3) and as having been, and interacted with, particular kinds of characters in the there-and-then of the narrated event. This analysis has thus yielded tools for locating and describing the multiple role positions that speakers perform in narrative discourse. These multiple “voices” or speaker roles are analyzable through systematic attention to sets of easily identifiable linguistic indexes. How particular voices recur and change across narrative contexts, on an individual and group-level was shown. Although the particular divergences in speakers’ French versus Portuguese narrative voicings are undoubtedly specific to this population, one would expect to find comparable consistencies and variations for speakers in any sociolinguistically diverse context, monolingual or bilingual. This framework could be applied to examine narratives for speakers from other populations, to illuminate the relative constancy versus variability in people’s identity displays. With this approach, one can go beyond dichotomous claims that identities are either entirely emergent (Goffman 1959), created de novo in the interaction, or stable, routinized dimensions of an individual’s habitus (Bourdieu 1977; 1984). One can then specify which dimensions of a speaker’s enacted identities are more habitual

CONCLUSION 243

or stable relative to those that are more context-specific. From there, one can then determine how and whether the contextual variations are themselves consistent. For example, Wortham (2001) examined how Jane, over the course of a life history interview, consistently shifted between two personas: that of the passive victim, and that of the assertive woman who takes control. Wortham argues that if Jane regularly enacts and describes these two personas, they would indeed become part of who she is, her “self.” However, without access to other contexts in which Jane narrates her experiences, Wortham has to speculate that these patterns of self- enactment and description are habitualized. With the approach presented here, one could empirically determine, qualitatively and quantitatively, the extent to which a speaker’s set of voices of self and other do indeed recur across narrative contexts. This would lend greater precision to attempts to identify the more habitual versus more creative dimensions of self-enactment. Implications for Discursive Relativity To what extent are these women’s language-specific identity enactments an effect of linguistic relativity (Lucy 1992; Whorf 1940/1956)? The bilingual women in this book do not assume different personas in two languages because of some general feature of Portuguese and French language and society. These languages are grammatically very similar, and from a Whorfian point of view are both examples of “Standard Average European” (Whorf 1940/1956). There may be slight differences in the grammatical resources available to speakers in French and Portuguese. However, these structural differences cannot alone account for why these people experience themselves and why listeners experience them as different in French. As such, the effects observed are less that of linguistic relativity (Whorf 1940/1956, Lucy 1992) than of discursive or functional relativity (Blommaert 2005; Hymes 1966, 1996; Lucy 1992, 1997). For example, it would have been grammatically and lexically possible for Isabel to render her French quote of her complaint to the postal worker Putain (Fuck) in equivalent Portuguese; conversely she could very well have translated her more neutral Portuguese “How can this be?” into relatively comparable French. We see such divergences from translational equivalents, not because of differences in the referential potential of French and Portuguese, but because of differences in the pragmatic forms available to these women, and the sociocultural realities those forms indexically presuppose and entail. In other words, it is highly doubtful that there is some inherent property of French or Portuguese that constrains the kind or degree of persona-performance speakers can perform in each language. As such, Teresa’s quoted utterance “You’re just an asshole” does not translate well from the urban youth culture of Paris to the landscape of a rural Portuguese village because of so-

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ciopragmatic rather than referential constraints. Rather than grammar, the differences observed result from the kinds of voicing to which participants have access in French and Portuguese. How French and Portuguese mediate these speakers’ different expressions and experiences of the self depends on the kinds of socioculturally recognized personas speakers can perform in each. Different types of performable interactions, values, and personas are evoked in each language for these speakers and listeners. In interaction with other bilingual peers who share these speakers’ linguistically invokable cultural frames, these differences arise as a function of speakers’ nonequivalent positionings in French versus Portuguese contexts. In switching languages, they summon up different repertoires of recognizable French- and Portuguese-speaking personas from the contexts in which they have circulated. In French, speakers more readily summon up the persona of the assertive, angry, hip, urban/suburbanite, whereas in Portuguese, they summon up more reserved, modest personas. How French and Portuguese mediate these speakers’ different expressions and experiences of self depends on the kinds of socioculturally recognized personas speakers can perform in each. It is thus not merely the referential capacity of French and Portuguese that structures these differences we see, but the different discursive forms available to these women, and the sociocultural contexts those forms conjure up. It is the nonreferential indexicality of these women’s use of French and Portuguese that produces the effects observed of language on the experience, display, and perception of identity. Different language forms have the power to transform self-expression and experience because of their capacity to index, to bring into being, other contexts and identities. As Silverstein (1976/1995) and Duranti (1992, 1997) have said about the creative potential of indexical language, context does not just dictate how language is used; sometimes language-use brings into relief particular kinds of contexts, and particular kinds of selves in context. Different ways of speaking, within and across languages create socially and psychologically real effects for people, producing for the same speaker multiple expressions and experiences of socially recognizable selves. Bilinguals’ vs. Monolinguals’ Relationships to Identity One might ask which dimensions of these French-Portuguese bilinguals’ language-linked divergence in self-experience, enactment, and perception are particular to bilinguals. Do bilinguals have a unique set of identity issues that do not emerge for monolinguals? Do these different ways of speaking need to be situated in distinct, named languages to produce these effects? To address these questions, one must first decide how to treat questions of identity and bilingualism relative to broader issues of identity in any sociolinguistically diverse context. On the one hand, Pavlenko has argued against re-

CONCLUSION 245

ducing bilingualism to “an expanded version of monolingualism, rather than a unique linguistic and psychological phenomenon” (2006b:1). She states that one should not equate monolinguals’ use of multiple registers with the experience of bilinguals’ use of two languages. But is the difference one of degree or of an entirely different order? On the other hand, in order not to marginalize or exoticize bilingualism, Woolard (2004) has argued against treating bilingual phenomena as fundamentally different from the management of sociolinguistic diversity that exists for speakers in any population. She reminds us that Gumperz (1982), Goffman (1979/1981), and Bakhtin (1981) each treated bilinguals’ use of multiple languages as having a similar function to other types of sociolinguistic multiplicity that also exist for monolinguals. From Woolard’s perspective, what transpires with bilinguals’ languages and identities may just provide a starker exemplification of what happens to any speaker who has multiple ways of speaking, within and/or across languages. I adopt an intermediate position. Indeed questions of bilingualism and identity should be understood relative to issues of sociolinguistic diversity and identity broadly conceived. However, when bilinguals, such as LDs, speak two named languages associated with ideologically monolingual nation-states, they may be more likely to construe the identities associated with their languages as separate and delimited. This is particularly true for LD bilinguals who live in and between two societies with highly developed ideologies of monolingual standard (Koven 2004a, Silverstein 1996a). These women have had the separateness of their two named languages emphasized for them, in numerous contexts throughout their lives. This may make LD bilinguals particularly aware of the distinctness of their languages. As registers appear less bounded and discrete than named languages, LDs’ monolingual French and Portuguese peers, on the other hand, may be less attuned to the effects of register shifting on their identities. As a result, these bilinguals may be more conscious of the relationships between language and identity than are their French or Portuguese monolingual counterparts. In other words, named national languages are more “pragmatically salient” (Errington 1985, 1988) and thus more readily available to speaker awareness for strategic manipulation and explicit metapragmatic reflection than is within-language register variation. As such, bilinguals’ experience of doubleness may itself be partially an effect of language ideologies that link two bounded languages to two bounded identities. Following Gal (1979), it is critical to keep in mind that bilinguals’ two languages are likely to be as internally differentiated as monolinguals’ “single” language. However, as LDs can treat their national languages as delineatable objects, they themselves talk about the differences between French and Portuguese with greater facility than they talk about their use of specific registers within each language. In other words, despite LDs’ relative

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awareness of having different “vocabularies” within each language that evoke particular cultural and sociolinguistic locations within French and Portuguese languages and societies, they talked far more easily about their “double identities” or “double cultures” (French-Portuguese), stressing the differences between France/French and Portugal/Portuguese. In so doing, they “erase” (Irvine and Gal 2000) the sociolinguistic diversity within each language,1 and assimilate their split lives and identities to two monolithic images of French/France and Portuguese/Portugal. And yet, ironically, in large measure what varied most for these women between languages were the registers they used within each language. In other words, for these LDs, it was their relationship to within-language diversity that produced the biggest crosslanguage differences. With their parents’ and their own complex trajectories, LDs’ use of each language positions them as speakers of socially marked varieties of these languages, not speakers of French and Portuguese writ large. However, despite the centrality of LD women’s within-language register use, monolingual language ideologies play a key role in the split these women report and display. We can then ask how such monolingual ideologies may differentially affect bilinguals versus monolinguals on the levels of the performance and the interpretation of identity. On the level of performance, it would be of great interest to compare monolinguals’ cross-context patterns of narrative voicing, to see how those patterns differ from or are similar to those found for bilinguals like LDs. It may be, however, that it is on the level of interpretation of their own performances that monolinguals and bilinguals would differ most. For example, LDs women’s highly developed metapragmatic awareness of languagelinked difference in their self-reports may be relatively unique to bilinguals. Following this logic, register-shifting French and Portuguese monolinguals might produce less elaborated accounts of the relationships among their different ways of speaking and experiences of context and identity. For example, one might wonder whether monolingual French or Portuguese monolingual speakers would ever claim to have a different “personality,” when they move between the colloquial language of their families, to the colloquial language of their peer groups, to the jargon of their professional colleagues. In other words, one might find that although French and Portuguese monolinguals may both have systematically different performances across sociolinguistic contexts, monolinguals may not as readily interpret these differences as indexing their distinct identities. Similarly, one might ask whether listeners’ interpretations of speakers’ identities would differ, when presented with monolinguals using different ways of speaking within a single language, versus bilinguals using different ways of speaking across languages. Much sociolinguistic research on intra-

CONCLUSION 247

and inter-speaker variation within a single language has certainly demonstrated that changes in ways of speaking affect participants’ interpretations of each other’s identities (e.g., matched guise). One might wonder, however, whether the fact that listeners heard speakers in two different, named, national languages would affect the extent to which they hear speakers as sounding like different types of people. It remains, in the end, an empirical question to determine in which types of contexts different types of bilingual and/or monolingual speakers and listeners come to interpret different ways of speaking as linked to distinct identities. It is essentially a Bakhtinian problem of how people dialogically position themselves and are positioned, relative to their different ways of speaking. Comparative research with different types of ethnographically situated monolinguals and bilinguals would enable us to address these questions more fully. Ultimately, I contend that something important differentiates LD bilinguals’ experiences of having distinct identities from the experiences of monolinguals who register shift, because LDs link their identities to two distinct named languages of ideologically monolingual nation-states, “French” and “Portuguese.” As such, these bilinguals have recourse to these languages as reified entities that become more readily accessible to their awareness, or more “pragmatically salient” (Errington 1985, 1988). In this way, language ideologies from these two ideologically monolingual national contexts play a critical role in the split experience these women report. This discussion of the importance of monolingual language ideologies in bilingual experience further develops arguments made by Pavlenko (2006a) and Ervin-Tripp and Reyes (2005). These authors write that bilinguals may only seem to be “different people” in their two languages in very specific sociolinguistic contexts, where speakers’ two languages are associated with distinct spatial or temporal contexts (e.g. in cases of adult migration). ErvinTripp and Reyes (2005) argue that in cases where bilinguals interact with other bilinguals, such a split is less likely, and semiotic contrasts between speakers’ two languages will tend to merge. However, Luso-descendants have not necessarily learned and used their languages in contexts dramatically separated in space or time. They circulate in a variety of contexts that put their two languages in very different relationships to each other—some that segregate their two languages and some where the two languages co-occur. However, even among other bilingual peers, where they may seem to momentarily relax the sense of boundedness of their two languages, such relaxation is fleeting and relative (Koven 2004a). Even in peer-group settings, they tease and police each other for “mixing” languages, remaining acutely aware of the importance of keeping French and Portuguese discrete. Similarly, it is noteworthy that the narrative elicitation tasks presented here were conducted with bilingual interviewers, with whom speakers could have

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accessed the other language and its associations. Following Ervin-Tripp and Reyes (2005), the semiotic contrast between French and Portuguese should theoretically have been less pronounced. I argue that what keeps LDs’ two languages and their associated identities separate or bounded is as much an effect of local language ideologies as literal spatiotemporal (geographical or chronological) distinctness of the linguistic contexts. Because LDs know that they must function with and be judged according to French and Portuguese monolingual, monocultural norms, they do not necessarily expect to be able to translate or transport the same kinds of identities easily across languages or contexts. As such, language ideologies are part of what creates the contexts that foster a sense of the separateness of speakers’ languages, identities, and contexts. It should not be surprising to find other populations of speakers who have access to multiple, verbally mediated, context-specific ways of displaying themselves. That said, before replicating a similar study with a different bilingual population, one should determine ethnographically how the different linguistic contexts and ways of speaking are distributed and interpreted within a community. The analyst should be careful to determine to what extent bilinguals themselves understand their languages as internally differentiated and sociolinguistically positioned as opposed to monolithic. Analysts should not assume the monolithic, bounded nature of speakers’ languages, but determine empirically if speakers themselves see their languages in this way. For example, these upwardly mobile Luso-descendants are far more aware of the importance of separating their two languages than their first-generation bilingual parents, whose awareness of the boundaries between French and Portuguese is somewhat blurrier. Other bilinguals less impacted by ideologies of monolingualism may not necessarily experience the presence of multiple idioms of self-display as occurring in distinct, separate “identity packages.” In this regard, that LDs seem to perform distinct French and Portuguese identities is related to the fact that they do, in large measure, occupy two ideologically monolingual worlds, even when among other bilinguals. Following Blommaert (2003, 2005) in the contemporary world of increased mobility, speakers may indexically summon up radically different identities as they move across sociolinguistic orders, beyond their control or intention. In this way, LDs’ situation is tightly connected to issues of the transnational transportability of identities (Blommaert 2005; Koven 2004a), in an era where nationally centered language ideologies still remain entrenched. The “split” for the bilinguals in this study is one example of this larger phenomenon. Further research should examine the sociolinguistic constraints different types of bilinguals encounter as they attempt to transport their identities across national borders and languages.2

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1

They also “erase” attention to the variation that comes from the creative bilingual blendings of their two languages. See Koven (2004a). 2 Building on Koven (2004a), in which it was shown how LDs’ speech and identities are routinely judged in both French and Portuguese societies, one should explore how bilinguals’ identities are negotiated with different types of interlocutors, such as in interactions with nonmigrant Portuguese and nonmigrant French. For example, many of the participants in this study who had lived primarily in France and vacationed in their parents’ native Portugal, have indeed followed through on their earlier stated plans and moved to Portugal. Future scholarship could explore how these LDs manage their sociolinguistic identities with nonmigrant Portuguese in Portugal, as they try to forge new class and national identities for themselves in their parents’ country of origin.

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APPENDIX A DESCRIPTION OF ENTRY INTO FIELD AND FIELD SITES

The materials presented in this book come from nineteen months of fieldwork with multiple groups of LDs during 1994-1995, 1997, and the summer of 2000. I spent seventeen and a half of those months in urban and suburban Paris with over sixty Luso-descendants, in a variety of monolingual and bilingual, private and public settings. The settings in which I observed LDs included a club (association) for the promotion of Portuguese language and culture among Luso-descendants that organizes formal and informal gatherings of LDs and sometimes their parents. As the majority of university students in Portuguese language, literature, and civilization are themselves Luso-descendants, I also become acquainted with several peer groups by auditing Portuguese studies classes at University of Paris III and IV throughout the 1994-1995 academic year. There I was able to observe and interact with LDs before, during, and after classes. I participated actively in both the association as well as the university courses, getting to know various groups and individuals quite well across a variety of informal and formal settings. I became well acquainted with many LDs from these different contexts, who then invited me into their homes, where I also observed them with their close family and friends. In these contexts, I was able to develop a sense of the different kinds of verbal performances and repertoires Luso-descendants had at their disposal in each language, as well as the effect that language-switching had on interactions and their participants. From these different groups, I recruited twenty-three LD women with whom I conducted the semi-structured, tape-recorded interviews that form the empirical core of the study reported in this book. Typically, I had already come to know the interviewees over the course of several months before asking them to participate in more controlled portions of the study. They would most likely not have been willing to be recruited for this study if I had been a total stranger. Following their participation in my more controlled interview, I continued to spend time with many of these women, in peer group settings, with their families, and also in more formal settings in which they were called upon to perform in standard French and Portuguese. As Luso-descendants’ frequent sojourns in Portugal are critical contexts in which they negotiate their languages and identities, I also followed a number of the participants in the study to Portugal on two separate occasions. I spent six weeks following nine LDs as well as their friends and family to urban and rural Portugal, either on their annual summer trips, or during their subsequent return migration. There I was able to watch them interact with nonémigré and émigré Portuguese in Portugal. My Sociolinguistic Positioning with Luso-descendants I was easily accepted into different Luso-descendant peer groups; as my physical appearance and manner of dress at the time of fieldwork did not clearly mark me as significantly older than or different from them. As my demeanor did not make me appear conspicuous, people frequently assumed that I too was a Luso-descendant, until I could explain who I was. Once I was able to explain myself, my purpose, and the nature of my interest, people generally were pleased to let me participate and observe. As this is not a population that has received much scholarly or media attention in France, people were often flattered that finally someone was

284 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

interested in their experience and had even gone to the effort of learning Portuguese, a language often undervalued in France. Usually, people accepted my requests to record them as a favor to help me out with a school project. I typically interacted with people in French. As French is indeed a language Luso-descendants often speak together, my addressing them in French was not unusual. Because of my own sociolinguistic and family history of having spent a significant amount of time in Paris during childhood and adolescence, my French does not mark me as nonnative. On the other hand, once people learned that I was not a Luso-descendant, my gradually evolving competence in Portuguese was both confusing and intriguing. I had studied Portuguese in the United States for two years and had spent several months in Lisbon the year before beginning fieldwork. People reacted strongly to my nonnative Portuguese. They were initially puzzled that someone of non-Portuguese origin could speak Portuguese and be interested in the Portuguese community. As few were accustomed to Portuguese speakers of nonPortuguese origin, many did not know how to understand my nonnative usage as different from the difficulties some Luso-descendants report. Ultimately, however, any attempt I made to speak Portuguese to LDs or their parents was met with pleasant astonishment, and was considered a sign of my genuine interest in and commitment to learning about them. LDs would introduce me to their relatives in Portuguese, often saying eagerly, “She’s American, but she speaks Portuguese,” as if the combination made me a real novelty. At any rate, once people saw my comprehension of and interest in Portuguese, they seemed quite comfortable displaying their Portuguese in front of and with me.

APPENDIX B PARTICIPANTS’ BACKGROUNDS

DEUG

Portuguese

20

20

20

Early

20s

Susana

Linda

Elena

Diana

origin

(F, P, LD)

boyfriend, but

boyfriend

Portuguese

Portuguese boyfriend, year.

Montes

Trás-os-

F

Portugal ages 6-12.

Lived in rural

suburbs of Paris from

Lived in distant

maintain both

Move to Portugal, but

LD. vacations in Portugal.

Portuguese or

LD boyfriend.

marry a Portuguese or

Montes

year after age 6.

Live in Portugal,

Lived in suburbs of

be a French teacher .

marry current Paris during school

Live in Portugal,

children.

Lived in suburbs of

have bicultural

year.

Live in Portugal and

Paris during school

Lived in suburbs of

Paris during school

Born and lived in rural

rural Portugal.

All summers in semi-

in semi-rural Portugal.

All summer vacations

and have bilingual

6.Since then, all

P

F

F

marry a Portuguese

year.

Portuguese village. children.

Live in Portugal,

Paris during school

Future plans

Lived in suburbs of

Experience in France

summers in

All vacations and

Portugal

Experience in

Portugal till age

boyfriend;

Portuguese

Trás-os-

Montes

Trás-os-

Montes

Trás-os-

F

of birth

Country

wants a

No current

DEUG

Portugal.

who lives in

Portuguese

DEUG

even LDs.

boys, not

Portuguese

wants to date

and only

has only dated

No current

Portuguese

Setúbal

region of

Origin

LD

Portuguese

Boyfriend’s

DEUG-

economics

Maîtrise

23

Antónia

Education*

Age

Speaker

Portuguese

Ana

Beatriz

Margarida

DEUG

Portuguese

Psychology

DESS

DEUG

Early

20s

LD

Minho

Montes

F

F

Lived in rural

Portugal.

All vacations in rural

Portugal.

12, all vacations in

12. Before 5, and after

Portugal from age 5-

during school year.

In suburbs of Paris

use both languages in

5, and after age 12.

marry her current LD

city (not village) and

Live in a Portuguese

future work.

Live in Portugal,

Lived in Paris till age

her family’s village.

her village and

Spanish Trás-os-

Live in Lisbon, not in

in Portugal between

and Lisbon.

LD,

school year.

P. Now divides time

Economics

20s

marry a Portuguese. Marry a Portuguese or

continue studies there,

Live in Portugal,

Paris during school

Lived in suburbs of

Lived in Paris during

Maîtrise,

Early

24

All vacations in rural and urban Portugal. All vacations in rural

F

F

Portugal.

France, or French in

involves Portuguese in

two. Have a job that

year. Beira

Sabugal

vacations in Portugal.

foreign

being torn between

kids the experience of

year, after age 8.

language

country, to spare her

Paris during school

20s

countries. Live in only one

Lived in suburbs of

Since then, all

Lived in rural Portugal till age 8.

P

connections to both

languages and

French as a

Early

Minho

Portuguese,

Aldina

Northern

Licence,

22

Natália

12 to present.

all vacations in Portugal.

birth to age 6 and age

Before 6 and after 12,

DESS

Law

Early

20s

Emília

studies, marry LD boyfriend, settle in

school year since age 8.

Since then all

Law

20s

DEUG

journalism

Early

20s

Portuguese)

F

in Germany

LD who lives

Montes

Trás-os-

Beira

P

P

maintain connections

of Paris since age 4.

raise children

5 on. Since then, all summers there.

vacation in Portugal.

bilingually,continue to

French boyfriend,

school year from age Portugal till age 5.

Lived in rural

Stay in France, marry

to France.

Move to Portugal but

Has lived in suburbs

Lived in Paris during

there.

then all vacations

Portugal till age 4.,

Lived in rural

work with Portugal.

and

Licence

children Portuguese,

Portugal.

(Spanish

Early

boyfriend. teach her

clerk in urban

Languages

Maria

current French

year.

internship as office

Foreign

Pombal

Stay in France, marry

summers in Portugal.

only one country.

Move to Portugal after

Lived in Paris during

Lived in rural Portugal till age 8.

Portugal.

vacations in urban

and after 18 all

Paris during school

DESS,

24

Teresa

Isabel

raise bilingual

after age 18.

ages 9-18. Before 9 children.

both countries and

Paris till age 9 and

Portugal (Porto) from

boyfriend. Maintain contact with

Lived in suburbs of

Lived in urban

Lived in suburbs of

F

P

F

Summers in rural

Lisbon

Alentejo/

Porto

Portugal. Completed

French

LD

French

Applied

Mechanics

Licence

24

Cristina

Portuguese

20s

Clara

Patrícia

Marina

Maîtrise

Early

Luisa

18

Foreign

20s

Lisbon

Portuguese

Montes

Trás-os-

near Lisbon

Santarém,

Minho

Minho

Near

LD

Portuguese.

but wants a

No boyfriend,

LD

DEUG

relations

Licence

Portuguese

20s

Early

LCE

Early

Portuguese

DEUG

20

Júlia

F

P

F

F

F

Vacations in rural

raise her children

after age 13.

there.

urban Portugal.

Vacations in rural and

during school year.

Suburbs of Paris

Portugal in some

Portuguese.

her children to speak

teach French. Wants

Portugal, wants to

Portuguese. If lives in

wants to teach

If lives in France, she

or defense.

capacity, such as law

but wants to work for

since then.

moving to Portugal,

school year.

6. All vacations there

Portugal until age 5 or

Not sure about

Lived in Paris during

bilingually.

Lusophone country,

year till age 6 and

Since then, vacations

Lived in rural

Portugal, or a

Paris during school

Portugal ages 6-13.

children bilingually.

teach French, raise

marry a Portuguese,

Move to Portugal,

bilingually.

her children

Portugal (Porto), raise

French in urban

Live in Portugal, teach

Live in France,

School years in Paris.

School years in Paris.

Lived in suburbs of

Lived in rural

Portugal.

Vacations in rural

Portugal.

Economics

DEUG

P

P

P

Vacations in rural

interpreter, marry a

and after age 12.

Portuguese minister of the Economy,. Raise

Lisbon and rural Portugal.

Montes

children bilingually.

become the

school year.

Portugal, in suburbs of

Trás-os-

Lisbon and

Live in Portugal,

vacations in Portugal.

Portuguese.

French, or be an

school year till age 8,

Otherwise spent

Lived in rural Portugal ages 8-12.

children.

Portuguese to her

teach French, speak

Move to Portugal to

Live in Lisbon, teach

suburbs of Paris.

School years in

Lived in Paris during

Portugal

Lived in Paris during

F

F

F

All vacations in

Lisbon

Alentejo/

Minho

*DEUG: Diplôme d’études universitaires générales, university degree awarded after two years Licence: university degree awarded after three years of study Maîtrise: university degree awarded after four years of study DEA: Diplôme d’études approfondies, university degree awarded after five years of study, with more academic focus DESS: Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées, university degree awarded after five years of study, with more professional focus

18

Portuguese

20s

Sofia

DEUG

Early

Alexandra

Portuguese

DEUG

19-20

Vanessa

APPENDIX C CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR Speaker Role Coding: Narrator role appears in italics Interlocutor role appears in bold Character role appears in underline Interlocutory device coding: Interlocutory devices placed after each device occurs ^ parenthetical remark *marked register usage that nonreferentially indexes speaker affect and/or social identity above and beyond the referent *f shift to familiar *v shift to vulgar *s shift to formal *o shift to other language + intensifiers that do not only refer to quantity and size, but rather index speaker affect or stance $ discourse marker/particle 2 shifts to a second-person pronoun to invite the audience to identify with the teller # laughter & interjections @ sighs Portuguese telling

I: ((laugh/gasp)), e outra história, se te lembras em França se tiveste uma uma má experiência com alguém, com uma pessoa que não conhecias , que não conheces. T: foi há dias, foi há dias.

English translation of Portuguese telling I: ((laugh/gasp)), and another story, if you remember in France if you had a a bad experience with someone, with a person you didn’t know, that you don’t know.

T: it was days ago, it was days ago.

English translation of French telling

French telling

1

E: yeah, ((throat clear)), and you had a conflict in France with uh a person you didn’t know, it was when, it was recently.

E: ouais, ((throat clear)), et tu as un conflit en France avec euh une personne que tu connaissais pas, c’était quand, c’était récemment.

2

T: yeah$ E: in the metro T: it was recently*s, you’re

T: ouais$ E: dans le métro T: c’était récemment*s, tu

294 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

T: eu cheguei, saí da associação já+ tarde, cheguei à estação e telefonei para Jean-Marc*ol ((said with French accent)) e disse-lhe assim, “vem, vem me buscar,” porque aquela hora já não tinha autocarro.

T: e quê é ^que eu disse, o tempo de ele chegar de de da casa até à estação, tinha tempo para ligar para Maria, liquei p’a Maria, e pronto$, eu tinha coisas a falar del-, com ela da associação.

T: I arrived, I left the association already+late, I arrived at the station and I called JeanMarc*ol ((said with French accent)) and told him like this, “come. come get me,” because at that hour there weren’t any more buses.

T: and what ^did I say, the time for him to get from home to the station, I had time to call Maria, I called Maria, and so$, I had things to talk about about th-, with her about the association.

gonna crack up*f^^2 E: it’s when you called me. T: when I called you2, yes,$ I didn’t tell you2 the, I didn’t tell you2 the rest*s,

vas rigoler*f ^^2 E: c’est quand tu m’as telephoné. T: quand je t’ai2 téléphoné, oui,$ je t’ai2 pas raconté la ,je t’ai pas2 raconté la suite*s,

3

so leaving*s the association. I take the train,

donc en sortant*s de l’association, je prends le train,

4

and I call JeanMarc on arrival*s, uh, I call him and I tell him, “Well,*f look, I’m at the station, can you come get me.”

et je téléphone à Marc en arrivant*s, euh, je je l’appelle, et je lui dis, “Ben,*f écoute, chuis à la gare, est-ce que tu peux venir me chercher.”

5

he says to me, “fine, I’m coming,”

il me dit, “très bien, j’arrive,”

6

but as, in the mean-, because he was getting out of the shower, the time for him to get dressed, the time for him to get there, I said to myself, “okay, I have the time to call Maria,”

mais comme ent, entre,parce que comme il sortait de la douche, le temps qu’il s’habille, le temps qu’il vienne, je me suis dit, “bon j’ai le temps d’appeler Maria,”

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR 295

ficámos, sei lá^*f, cinco minutos ao telefone,

we stayed on the phone, I dunno ^*f, five minutes,

7

so$, I call Maria, we start talking, and all$*f,

bon$, j’appelle Maria, on commence à discuter, machin$*f,

chegou um carro, tinha ‘tava lá um homem e uma mulher, começaram a mandar vir*f, mas à sério+,

a car arrived, there was there was a man and a woman, they started making noise*f, but really+,

8

and uh, there was a car next to the the phone booth and uh and the guy*f , he starts to to, not yelling*v, but at any rate$ saying, “okay, that’s enough uh,*f”

et euh, y avait une voiture à à côté de la la cabine et euh et le type*f il commence à à, pas à gueuler*v, m’enfin$ à dire, “bon, ça suffit, maintenant euh, *f”

9

E: he was in his car, the guy? T: he was, they were in the car. him, and a woman, they were in the car. and well$, apparently*s, they were waiting for the phone,

E: il était dans sa voiture, le type? T: il était, ils étaient dans la voiture. lui, et une femme, ils étaient dans la voiture. et ben$ , apparemment*s, ils attendaient pour le téléphone,

disse assim, “mas quê é que há? há algum problema?”

I said like this, “what’s wrong ? is there a problem ?”

1 0

uh, I say. “look *f, is there, is there a problem, I, I’ve been, I just got here, so uh, (can) you wait two little *f minutes,”

euh, j’ dis. “écoutez *f, il y a , il y a un problème, moi ça fait, je viens d’arriver, donc euh, vous attendez deux petites *f minutes,”

“pois*f, os os telefones nas estações só é para urgências, já ‘tá aí *f há mais de dez minutos,”

“yeah *f, the the phones in stations , it’s only for emergencies, you’ve been here *f for more than ten minutes,”

1 1

“yeah,*f gnagna gna, *f” he starts yelling *v,

“ouais,*f gnagna gna, *f” commence à gueuler*v,

296 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

“não estou,” disse assim, “não estou aqui há mais de dez minutos, eu estou aqui há cinco minutos,”

“I haven’t been,” I said like this, “ I haven’t been here more than ten minutes, I’ve been here for five minutes,”

e pronto $ comecei, fiz o que , fiz o que devia de fazer, sempre+ a falar com a tua irmã,

and so,$ I started, I did what, I did what I had to do, still+ talking with your sister,

mas ele, começou a mandar vir*f mesmo+, assim,

but he, he started to make noise/yell *f a lot+, like this,

e a tua irmã ‘tava a ouvir, “mas pronto mas, deixa lá *f, vai lá a tua vida *f,e falamos depois,”

and your sister was listening, “okay, let’s leave it here *f, go do your thing *f, and we’ll talk later,”

1 2

so I keep on talking, dada*f, dada,*f

donc je continue à parler, machin, *f machin, *f

1 3

and then, and then y’know$*f, the guy *v starts to really+ get mad, you see^ E: yeah T: “yeah*f, you’ve been in there/that thing*f for more than five minutes, uh, uh, at any rate, the phones, uh uh near by stations, it’s really only for emergencies,”

et puis, et puis quoi $*f le mec*v commence vraiment+ à s’énerver, tu vois^ E: ouais T: “ouais,*f ça fait plus de cinq minutes que vous êtes là-dedans*f, euh, euh, de toute façon les téléphones euh euh auprès de les à côté des gares c’est vraiment que pour les urgences,”

1 4

“well, look,*f I, I’ve been here for five minutes, so, please,*s let me speak,”

“ben, écoutez,*f j’en, chuis là depuis cinq minutes, alors, s’il vous plaît,*s laissez-moi parler,”

1 5

okay$, so, the person*s on the phone says to me, “look, that’s fine, we’ll talk about it next =” E: = yeah

bon$ alors la personne*s au téléphone me dit, “écoute, c’est bon, on en parlera la prochaine =” E: = ouais

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR 297

e eu, pronto$, desliguei,

and I, well$, I hung up,

o gaijo*v, saí da do coisa, da cabine, e ele começou a me mandar vir*f, “pois *f, os telefones não não são para para estar as horas *f ao telefone, aqui nas estações, é só para, quando há problema,”

the guy*v, I left the the thing, the booth , and he started yelling*f at me, “yeah *f, phones aren’t aren;t for staying hours *f on the phone, here in train stations, it’s only for, when there’s a problem,”

e eu digo “escute lá *f, mas os telefones, o problema não é o seu, eu só tive aqui que cinco minutos, portanto *s não venha mandar vir,*f” I: mm

and I say “look here *f, phones, the problem isn’t yours, I’ve only been here five minutes, therefore *s don’t come yell at me,*f” I:mm

T: ele ‘tava no carro, tratou-me dos nomes de todos+ os nomes , de puta *v, de ,

T: he was in the car, he called me names, by every+ name, whore*v, by,

T: “time, okay, bye, see ya’, okay, see you next time,” I hang up,

T: “fois, euh, allez, salut à la prochaine, bon, à la prochaine fois,” je raccroche,

1 7

the guy*v, he insulted*s me with every+ name, every+ name, so he called me a whore*v, a bitch*v, a slut*v, and come- come suck*v, heand s- what hit me the most+-

1 8

E: with the broad next to him? T: yes$, and the broad*f, she was

le mec*v, il m’a insultée*s de tous+ les noms, de tous+ les noms, alors il m’a traité de pute*v, de conne*v, de salope*v, et vienviens suce*v, il m’a , et a-, ce qui m’a fait le plus+ frappé E: avec la bonne femme à côté? T: oui$, et la bonne femme*f ,

1 6

298 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

tratou-me de Alemã, disse assim, “Alemã ?” “Sim, sim, alemã.” disse, “a essa é a melhor, agora tenho a cara alemã” e eu, portanto * s, e ele era preto*f I: mm T: estas a ver ^?

he called me a German, I said like this, “German ?” “Yes, yes, German.” I said, “that’s the best one, now I look like a German,” and I, therefore *s, and he was colored *f I: mm T: you see ^?

1 9

saying, “oh, oh, oh,” because she saw that he was going too far, you see^ E: yes T: and at one point, he says to me, “German.” E: ((laugh)) T: the first+ thing that insults *s me E: that’s an insult. T: there you go$, on top of that, he was of color*s, you see^, well$, I dunno^, well$, when, already+ when you2 see the racial*s problems^ there are in France between blacks and whites, uh-^ he has the nerve*f he calls me a German,

elle disait, “oh, oh, oh,” parce qu’elle voyait qu’il allait trop loin, tu vois^ E: oui T: et à un moment, il me dit, “Allemande.” E: ((laugh)) T: la première+ chose qui m’insulte*s E: c’est une insulte, ça. T: voilà$, en plus, lui il était de couleur*s, tu vois^, ‘fin$, chais pas^,alors $ quand, déjà +quand tu2 vois les problèmes raciaux*s ^ qu’il y a en France entre les blancs et les noirs, euh,^ lui il se gêne*f-, il me traite d’Allemande,

I say, “German ?” I say, “yes,” he says to me, “yes, German.”

j’ dis “Allemande?” J’dis, “oui”, il me dit, “ oui, Allemande.”

2 0

I say, “hold on *f, uh, first of all I’m not German, and anyway, what’s it have to do with anything,*f”

j’ dis, “mais attendez *f, euh, d’abord chuis pas allemande, et puis qu’est-ce que ça peut faire, *f”

2 1

“yeah uh*f, the phone, it’s not made *f to be

“ouais euh *f le téléphone, c’est pas fait *f pour

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR 299

2 2

T: e a tratar-me de Alemã, e puta*v, e não sei,^e , todos+, vem cá chupar, *v coisas assim horríveis, pá %*f, horríveis+ I: ((gasp))

2 3

T: disse assim, “‘tá bem, ‘tá bem,”

T: and calling me a German, and whore*v, and I dunno,^ and , all+ of them, come suck me, *v, horrible things like that, man%*f, horrible+ I: ((gasp)) T: I said like this,”okay, okay,”

e a moça*f que ‘tava com ele, disse assim, “ he, calma,” porque os , ela também achou que que aquela situação*s, ele não não tinha a me chamar nomes .

and the girl*f who was with him, said like this, “hey, calm down,” because the, she also thought that that that situation*s, he shoudn’t have called me names.

2 5

porque eu não fiquei muito+

because I didn’t stay on much+

2 6

2 4

stayed on for an hour,” I say to him. “look *f, I didn’t stay an hour, I stayed five minutes.” “no,*f you weren’t on five minutes, and then at any rate, you’re just a , just a whore,*v a,” anyway,$ he called me every+ name, every+ name. I said to him, “well okay.” because I wasn’t going to um start um to confront*s him, because he would a’ punched the shit-,^*v on top of that he was tall, he would a punched the shit out of me^*v, I’d be on the ground,^*f you see^ E: yeah

euh, pour rester une heure,” je lui dis, “écoutez *f, chuis pas restée une heure, je suis restée cinq minutes.” “non,*f vous êtes pas restée cinq minutes, et puis d’abord vous êtes qu’une qu’une pute, *v une,” m’enfin,$ il m’a traité de tous+ les noms, tous+ les noms. je lui ai dit, “bon d’accord.” parce que j’allais pas euh commencer euh à l’affronter*s, parce qu’il m’aurait foutu^*v, en plus il était grand, il m’aurait foutu un ‘gnon,^*v je serais par terre,^*f tu vois^ E: ouais

300 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

tempo, realmente+*s eles não ficaram muito+ tempo ao telefone, só+ só+ uns minutos, nem+ isso,

time, really+*s they didn’t stay on much+ time on the phone just+ just+ a couple minutes, not even+ that,

mas pá,%*f o gaijo*v, chamarme de todos+ os nomes, pá%*f e eu a, só+ por tinha ficado cinco minutos ao telefone,

but man%*f, the guy*v, calling me by every+ name, man%*f, and I, just+ because I was on the phone for five minutes,

então$ imagina^, mas se fosse *s com rapaz^,já+ era diferente^ I: mm T: não me tinha não me tinha me chamada nomes,^ mas bom$ eu disse assim, “uma rapariga, também não vou chegar a ele porque ele dá -me uma lambada*f , fico no chão.” I: sim

so $ imagine^, but if it were*s with a boy^, it’d already+ be different^ I: mm T: he wouldn’t have he wouldn’t have called me names,^ but okay $ I said like this, “a girl, I’m not gonna go up to him, because he’ll give me a smack *f, I end up on the ground.” I: yes T: therefore$*s, I said like this, “okay, okay. you’re*f right, go on ahead*f, go on ahead to your life*f, I’ll go with mine.”

T: portanto$*s, disse assim , “’tá bem, ‘tá bem, tens*f razão, vai lá*f, vai lá a tua vida*f, que eu vou à minha.”

2 7

2 8

T: so, I said to myself, “okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, it’s your *f life, I have my own.”

T: alors, je me suis dit, “okay, d’accord, d’accord, d’accord, ok, c’est ta *f vie, moi j’ai la mienne.”

2 9

I called him, “anyway, you’re just an asshole *v

je l’ai traité de, “de toute façon, vous êtes qu’un

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR 301

3 0

for insulting people like that, uh,”

con *v, pour insulter des gens comme ça, euh,”

E: and he, he did-, he didn’t say anything when you said that? T: nothing^+, nothing^+, nothing^+, no$, he called me by every+ name. E: oh, yeah. oh, okay T: all that, I don’t remember in detail, about, about the sequence^*s, but he was calling me by every+ name.

E: et lui, il a, il a rien dit quand tu as dit ça ? T:rien^+, rien^+ rien^+, non$, il m’a traité de tous+ les noms.

and there was uh, apparently*s there was another another person*s who arrived uh, a Black, by the way*s, who arrived, apparently*s also to make a call,

et il y avait euh, apparemment*s il y avait un autre une autre personne*s qui est arrivée euh, un noir d’ailleurs*s qui est arrivé, apparemment *s aussi pour téléphoner,

he started talking to him, “yeah *f, she’s been there more than five minutes, nanana,”*f^ ((long pause)) five minutes.^ E: ((breathy chuckle))

il a commencé à lui parler, “ouais *f, ça fait plus de cinq minutes qu’elle était là, nanana” *f^ ((long pause)) cinq minutes.^ E:((breathy chuckle))

T: I say to him, “hold on *f, if you

T: Je lui dis, “mais attendez *f,

E: ah bon, ah, d’accord T: tout ça, je me souviens pas en détail, du , de la chronologie^*s, mais il me traitait de tous +les noms.

302 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

pronto$, mas estas a ver^, coisas que, se fosse*f em Paris,^ porque sabes em Paris,^ é preciso^ ‘tar horas*f à espera ao telefone,^ e pronto, $

okay$, but you see^, things that, if it were*f in Paris. because you know in Paris,^ it’s necessary ^ to wait hours*f for the phone,^ and okay,$

eu até,+ às vezes toco na porta^,

I even+, sometimes I knock on the door^, and I said like this, “do you, do you think you’ll be on the phone long?” ah I: yes, but you speak T: normally,*s “do you think you’ll be on, be on the phone long ?”

disse assim, “tem, pensa ficar muito tempo ao telefone?” ah I: sim mas falas T: normalmente, *s “pensa ficar ficar muito tempo ao telephone?”

3 2

were,” oh yes$$, as he was in the car, I said to him, “but look*f, if it’s urgent, take your car, go to another phone, I’ve been here for five minutes, don’t start*f yelling *v.”

si vous étiez,” ah oui$$, comme il était en voiture, je lui ai dit, “ mais écoutez *f, si c’est urgent, prenez votre voiture, vous allez à un autre téléphone, ça fait cinq minutes que je suis là, commencez *f pas à gueuler.*v”

“yeah*f, gnagnagna,*f^ it’s only meant for emergencies, nanana,*f^” E: ((laugh))

“ouais *f, gnagnagna*f^, c’est fait que pour les urgences, nanana*f^” E: ((laugh))

T: I got, it really+ made me very+*s ((unusual liaison pronounced)) angry, you see^ because sometimes *f in Paris, uh, you2 wait more than five minutes^

T: je me suis, ça m’a vraiment+ beaucoup+ ((unusual liaison pronounced))*s énervée , tu vois^, parce que des fois *f à Paris, euh, tu2 restes plus de cinq minutes^ E: ouais

E: yeah T: so, okay$, when you see^2 that the person *s is still+ on the phone, so$, me sometimes it happens to me^, it’s to say ^^, “look*f, excuse me, will you be long?”

T: alors, bon$, quand tu vois ^2 que la personne*s est toujours+ au téléphone, alors$, moi ce qui m’arrive de temps en temps^, c’est de dire^^, “écoutez *f, excusez-moi, vous

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF TERESA’S STORY PAIR 303

e um um dia aconteceu-me,

and one one day it happened to me,

“sim, sim,” era uma uma estrangeira, “estou a ligar para o meu país, portanto*s se fizer o favor*s de ir ao outro cabine, que eu agora certo+ tenho para um quarto de hora.”

“yes, yes,” it was a a foreigner, “I’m calling my country, therefore *s if you’d do me the favor*s of going to another booth, because I’ll definitely+ be on for a quarter of an hour.”

quê é ^que eu fiz, não ia a mandar vir*f I: claro T: fui-me embora,

what did^ I do, I wasn’t going to yell at her*f I: of course T: I left, and I went

3 3

3 4

either he tells you no,^2 or he tells you yes,^2

en avez encore pour longtemps?” soit il te dit, non,^2 soit il te dit, oui, ^2

and then okay$, you go look for another booth^^2 E: you go look for another one, yeah,

et puis bon$, tu vas chercher une autre cabine^^2 E: tu vas en chercher une autre, ouais,

T: that’s^ what ha- , by the way*s, that happened to me once, uh, uh, it’s a woman ^ who was speaking uh another language that that that, was speaking a language that I didn’t know,

T: c’est^ ce qui est, d’ailleurs*s, ça m’est arrivé une fois, euh, une , c’est ^une femme qui parlait euh une autre langue que que que, parlait, une langue que je connaissais pas,

and uh, the same^*f, I knocked on the door, “excuse me, will you be long ?”

et euh, pareil^*f, j’ai frappé à la porte, “excusezmoi, vous en avez pour longtemps?”

she says to me, “well look, *f yes, because I’m calling my country, and uh, I’m going to be on for a little bit,*f”

elle me dit, “ben écoutez *f, oui, parce que je téléphone dans mon pays, et euh, je vais en avoir pour un p’tit moment,*f”

well$, what ^was I going to, I wasn’t going to start yelling *v E: yes

ben$, qu’est-ce que^ j’allais, j’allais pas commencer à gueuler*v

304 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

e fui telefonar para outro lado, e pronto$.

to make a call somewhere else, and okay$.

mas há pessoas,^ enervam-se*s logo +^ e me chamam de todos+ os nomes^ I: só acontece às vezes T: mas eu fiquei com os nervos, não imaginas2^ I: imagino muito bem.

but there are people,^ they get angry*s right away+^ and call me by every+ name^ I: only happens sometimes T: but I got wound up, you can’t imagine2^ I: I can imagine very well.

T: so okay$$, I left, I looked for another booth E: mm T: you see,^ 3 5

but him, no$, right away+, he started yelling*v and insulting*s E: yeah T: that, I , ((gasp))&,pff%, it makes me deeply+*s angry^ E: yeah well, for good reason.

E: oui T: bon ben $$, chuis partie, j’ai cherché une autre cabine E: mm T: tu vois, ^ mais lui, non$, tout de suite+, il a commencé à gueuler*v, et à insulter*s E: ouais T: ça, moi ça ((gasp- ))&, pff% ça m’énerve profondément+*s ^ E: ouais, ben il y a de quoi.

APPENDIX D TERESA’S OVERALL PROFILE Table D.1 Proportions of clauses in each speaker role: Teresa’s entire corpus French Narrator 47.0 (n = 783) Interlocutor 47.4 (n = 790) Character 29.4 (n = 489) Total clauses 1665.0

Portuguese 50.7 (n = 595) 41.3 (n = 484) 31.2 (n = 366) 1173.0

Table D.2 Percentages of clauses in different registers in speaker’s “own” voice (narrator and interlocutory roles) French Portuguese Total clauses in Narrator and 100.0 100.0 Interlocutor roles (n = 1176) (n = 807) Unmarked 75.8 82.5 (n = 891) (n = 666) Familiar 13.3 5.6 (n = 156) (n = 45) High 10.5 10.7 (n = 124) (n = 86) Vulgar 1.7 0.9 (n = 20) (n = 7) Other language 0.1 0.6 (n = 1) (n = 5) Total marked 24.2 17.5 (n = 285) (n = 141)

Table D.3 Percentages of different interlocutory devices relative to all interlocutory devices French Portuguese Shifts to familiar 18.6 10.3 (n = 200) (n = 66) Shifts to high 13.9 15.1 (n = 150) (n = 97) Shifts to vulgar 2.5 1.7 (n = 27) (n = 11) Shifts to other language 0.1 0.8

306 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Total register shifts Intensifiers Second person Interjections Discourse Markers Parentheticals Laughter Sighs Gasps

(n = 1) 35.1 (n = 378) 20.9 (n = 225) 1.2 (n = 13) 2.5 (n = 27) 17.5 (n = 188) 21.7 (n = 234) 0.8 (n = 9) 0.1 (n = 1) 0.1 (n = 1)

(n = 5) 28.0 (n = 179) 31.4 (n = 201) 0.2 (n = 1) 1.1 (n = 7) 11.6 (n = 74) 27.2 (n = 174) 0.3 (n = 2) 0.3 (n = 2) 0.0 (n = 0)

Table D.4 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation (C) in different speech registers across quoted characters French Portuguese All C(haracter) speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 389) (n = 298) Unmarked C 65.6 77.9 (n = 255) (n = 232) Familiar C 25.4 16.4 (n = 99) (n = 49) High C 7.5 7.4 (n = 29) (n = 22) Vulgar C 3.6 0.7 (n = 14) (n = 2) Other language C 0.0 0.0 (n = 0) (n = 0) Marked C total 34.4 22.1 (n = 134) (n = 66)

Table D.5 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation of self (C1) in different speech registers French Portuguese All C(haracter)1 speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 266) (n = 176) Unmarked C1 64.3 78.4 (n = 171) (n = 138) Familiar C1 24.4 13.6 (n = 65) (n = 24) High C1 9.0 8.5

TERESA’S OVERALL PROFILE 307

Vulgar C1 Other language 1C Marked C1 total

(n = 24) 4.1 (n = 11) 0.0 (n = 0) 35.7 (n = 95)

(n = 15) 1.1 (n = 2) 0.0 (n = 0) 21.6 (n = 38)

Table D.6 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation of others (C3) in different speech registers French Portuguese All C(haracter) 3speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 123) (n = 122) Unmarked C3 68.3 76.2 (n = 84) (n = 93) Familiar C3 26.0 21.3 (n = 32) (n = 26) High C3 4.1 5.7 (n = 5) (n = 7) Vulgar C3 2.4 0.0 (n = 3) (n = 0) Other language C3 0.0 0.0 (n = 0) (n = 0) Marked C3 total 31.7 23.8 (n = 39) (n = 29)

APPENDIX E CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF ISABEL’S STORY PAIR Speaker Role Coding: Narrator role appears in italics Interlocutor role appears in bold Character role appears in underline Interlocutory device coding: Interlocutory devices placed after each device occurs ^ parenthetical remark *marked register usage that nonreferentially indexes speaker affect and/or social identity above and beyond the referent *f shift to familiar *v shift to vulgar *s shift to formal *o shift to other language + intensifiers that do not only refer to quantity and size, but rather index speaker affect or stance $ discourse marker/particle 2 shifts to a second-person pronoun to invite the audience to identify with the teller # laughter & interjections @ sighs Portuguese I: aconteceu-me este ano, foi, chateei-me*f mesmo+, foi, foi quando fui aos correios.

English translation of Portuguese I: it happened to me this year, it was, I got really+ bugged*f, it was, it was when I went to the post office.

English translation of French

French

1

porque eu tinha lá uma conta em Portugal, e fui aos correios e perdi o:- ,

because I had there an account in Portugal, and I went to the post office and I lost the:-,

2

I: well um$, I have^, in fact$, I have an account, at the, the post office, over there, ^(.)

I: bah euh$ , j’ai,^ en fait$, j’ai un compte, dans la , la poste, làbas,^ (.)

quer’ dizer, dum

I mean, from one

3

and normally,

et normalement,

310 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

ano para o outro nun-nunca ++me lembro ^^^onde punha o cartão da conta T: mh, com o número do teu conta I: com o número da conta, e a a , quer dizer, a prova do que eu sou bem+ a titular *s da conta^^^^ T: mh I: e perdi o, ou pensei que têlo lá em Portugal, só que , apareceu*s que não, a minha madrinha também não o tinha e tal,*f

year to the next I ne- never ++ remember^^^ where I put the card to the account T: mh, with your account number I: with the account number, and the the, I mean, the proof that I really + am the bearer*s of the account^^^^ T: mh I: and I lost the, or I thought I had it there in Portugal, except that, it appeared*s that no, my godmother didn’t have it either and so forth,*f

you know ^, they give you, 2(.)^ um instead of giving you 2 a booklet^ A: mm I: they give you2 a li’l +card, (.) a li’l +card, you know$*f, a scrap*f of paper^. where you got your2 account number.^ and which, which is indeed+ the proof *s ^that you’re 2 the bearer *s of the account.^ the problem, it’s that me, from one year to the next, I never + know where it is ^^,

tu sais^, ils te donnent, 2 (.)^ euh au lieu de te2 donner un livret^ A: mm I: ils te 2donnent un p’tit+ carton, (.) un p’tit+ carton, quoi,$*f un bout *f de papier^. où t’as ton 2 numéro de compte.^ et qui, qui est bien+ la preuve*s^ que t’es 2 titulaire *s de compte.^ le problème, c’est que moi, d’une année sur l’autre, je sais jamais+ où il est ^^,

so I leave it over there, with my godmother, with my family,^ I leave it ^and then, I tell them,^ “you *f put it aside for me for when I come back,”

donc je le laisse là-bas, à ma marraine, à ma famille, ^ je le laisse^ et puis , je leur dis,^ “vous *f me le mettez de côté pour quand je reviens,” cette année, personne+ le trouvait. A: ((laugh)) I: moi qui voulais retirer du fric*f, p’ce que, il fallait que, je vive vive quand même+ sur ça. j’avais des cadeaux à acheter et tout*f

this year, no one+ could find it. A: ((laugh)) I: with me wanting to take out some dough*f, b’cause I had to live live at any rate+ on that. I had presents to buy and everything*f, whatever, $*f

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF ISABEL’S STORY PAIR 311

okay$,

machin$*f bon$,

I wanted my money. impossible*f to find the card. my godmother who was saying to me,

j’voulais mon argent. impossible*f de retrouver le carton. ma marraine qui me disait, “mais j’suis sûre que c’est toi qui l’as emmené en France, tu l’as rangé, chais pas trop où,”*f moi qui dis, “mais non,*f j’ai pas pu l’emmener.” ‘fin bon,$$

“but I’m sure you’re the one who took it to France, you put it away I dunno where,”*f me saying, “no way, *f I couldn’t have taken it.” well okay,$$ eu fui aos correios, a perguntar o quê o quê é que eu podia fazer, e as pessoas lá são muito+ desagradáveis*s, ^

and the people there are very +unpleasant*s,^

dizem -te2 logo+ que agora que ^(unclear), disse-me logo+ que agora que , só+ tendo*s, só+ fazendo*s, só+ pedindo*s a Lisboa um um novo cartão, não sei quê, não sei quê mais, *f^^

they tell you2 right away+ that ^(unclear)he/she told me right away+ that, only+ by having*s, only+ by making*s, only+ by asking*s for a new card from Lisbon blablabla,*f^^ with the national

and I went to the post office to ask what what I could do,

4

then I go to the post office anyway+ to find out, saying to myself myself , “okay, maybe they have me my name in the file, they know I have an account with them.” (.) well uh,$ not at all.+*f the chick*f really+ made me mad.

puis je vais à la poste quandmême+ me renseigner, me me dire, “bon, p’tet qu’ils m’ont mon nom dans le fichier, ils savent que j’ai un compte chez eux.”(.) ben euh,$ pas du tout. +*f la nana*f m’a vraiment+ énervée.

5

she says to me um, “well, yeah, well *f now, you have to write to Lisbon, to send a letter saying that *s (.) that you have an account at the post office, that you lost the card, that you want them to make you another, them to make you

elle me dit euh, “ben, ouais, ben, *f ,maintenant, il faut écrire à Lisbonne, pour envoyer une lettre en disant que *s (.) que vous avez un compte à la poste, que vous avez perdu le carton, que vous voulez qu’on vous fasse

312 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

com o bilhete de identidade que eu não tenho^ T: mh

I: porque ainda+, mandei-o fazer, mas houve um problema, e ainda+ não o tenho, ^

card that I don’t have^ T: mh

I: because on top of that,+ I sent it to be made, but there was a problem, and I still+ don’t have it,^

another one.” (.)

une autre, qu’on vous en fasse un autre.” (.)

6

I said, I’m like*f “fuck,*v in your files, you must have my name, uh, there isn’t another way, without without having *s to to send a letter to Lisbon and waiting I dunno how much time?*f”

7

because on top of + that you 2 need your your your i.d. card from over there, that I don’t have yet, ^^ that I had made. (.) but obviously *s, administration being what it is *s, they made an error*s on my i.d. card, they put me*s((unusual pronunciation of feminized past participle)) down from another village. so they redid it for me. well, $yes,$ I should go there to have it redone,^^^ but it stressed me out,*f so I didn’t go, so I don’t have it. ^(.)

j’ai dit, j’fais *f “mais putain *v, dans vos fichiers, vous avez bien mon nom, euh, il y a pas un aut’ moyen, sans sans être obligé *s de d’envoyer une lettre à Lisbonne et d’attendre je sais pas combien de temps?*f” puisqu’en plus+ il te2 faut ton ton ta 2 carte d’identité de là-bas, que moi, je n’ai pas encore,^^ que j’ai fait faire. (.) mais comme évidemment *s, l’administration étant ce qu’elle est ^*s , ils ont fait une erreur*s sur ma carte d’identité, ils m’ont mise*s d’un autre village. donc on me l’a refait. ‘fin $, oui$, il faudrait que j’y aille pour la refaire,^^^ mais, ça m’a pris la tête.*f donc j’y suis pas allée, donc je l’ai pas. ^ (.)

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF ISABEL’S STORY PAIR 313

portanto*s eu chateei-me*f um bocado +com com ela porque, não sabem ajudar, não sabem^^^ T: mas, ‘tas a dizer, chateaste com ela mas, lembras-te do como é que te zangastes, sei lá, sentiste-te, ficaste enervada, e dissesteI: fiquei enervada*s, disse-lhe que, as coisas que não se fazem assim, que se podia ajudar um bocado:+ o- a gente*f quando há um problema T: mh I: são são a administração*s, são, tenho lá uma conta , normalmente*s, têm, devem, deviam ter a possibilidade*s a procurar*s no – no- nos papéis deles, se há realmente*s uma conta lá T: mh I: na, na vila T: sim] I: não é preciso ir a Lisboa, enervei*s-me um bocado+, dizer, “então, mas

therefore*s I got a bit+ angry*f with with her because, they don’t know how to help, they don’t know how^^^ T: but you’re saying you got annoyed at her, but do you remember how you got angry, I dunno, you felt, you got angry and saidI: I got angry*s, I told her that things aren’t done/to be done like that, that if they/he/she could help folks*f a little+ when there’s a problem T: mh I: you/they are you/they are an administration*s, you are, I have an account , normally *s there, you/they have, you/they have to, they/you should/had to have the possibility*s to search*s in- intheir papers, if there truly *s is an account there T: mh I: in the, in the city T: yes I: it isn’t necessary to go to

8

so I said, “but wait,*f there’s no other possibility? *s you can’t look on your lists, in your files ?”

I dunno,^ they must still work manually,^^*s computers, they haven’t heard of ‘em.^^

“yeah, *f so in their file, you don’t have my name, saying *s that I am the bearer *s of account number such and such*s, uh I have a passport, I have an i.d, card- green card, it’s that I can prove my identity*s, that’s no problem,*f”

donc j’ai dit, “mais attendez*f, y a pas une aut’ possibilité?*s vous ne pouvez pas rechercher dans vos dans vos listes, dans vos fichiers,” chais pas,^ ils doivent travailler encore manuellement, ^^*s mais l’ordinateur, ils connaissent pas. ^^ “ouais,*f alors dans leur fichier euh , vous avez pas mon nom, en disant*s que j’suis titulaire*s du compte numéro tant*s , euh, j’ai un passeport, j’ai une carte d’idencarte de séjour, c’est que je peux prouver mon identité,*s ça c’est pas un problème,*f”

314 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

como isto ? Não é normal.” ((low voice))

Lisbon, I got a little+ angry*s, saying, “so, but how/why is this ? it isn’t normal.” ((low voice)) 9

1 0

“no, no, can’t be done,*f”((highpitched delivery of quote)) I say, “oh frig!” *f she made me mad, A: hh I I walked out of there, but+ I was fuckin’pissed +*v,

A: hmm I: the administration*s, un, they’re they’re assholes/idiots,*v they’re assholes/idiots.*v like everywhere+ by the way*s^^^, but okay$, in short,$ that, that particularly +*s stressed me out*f A: ((laugh)) I: I would have really + liked, I would have really + liked to break something over their heads at that moment . ^^ it stinks,*f y’know,$*f the system, *s, really+stinks.*f^ I mean not even+ when you2 go to a

“non, non, c’est pas possible,*f “((high-pitched)) je dis, “oh purée!” *f elle m’a énervée, A:hh I: je suis sortie de là, euh mais+*f, j’étais vraiment + vénère*v, A: hmm I: l’administration, *s euh, c’est c’est des cons,*v c’est des cons.*v comme partout + d’ailleurs, *s^^^ mais bon,$ bref$ que là, ça m’a particulièrement +*s pompée*f

A: ((laugh)) I: je leur aurais bien+ je leur aurais bien+ cassé quelque chose sur la tête, à ce moment-là. ^^ c’est pourri,*f quoi,$*f le système,*s vraiment +pourri.*f^ je veux dire

CODED TRANSCRIPTS OF ISABEL’S STORY PAIR 315

bank or the post office here,

if you2 don’t have your account number, if you2 forgot it. they can look for it*s with your name, it’s no problem. over there, no, they dunno what it is. (11^)

T: e ninguém te ajudou ouI: não (h) , é difíci(h)l lá de aju(h)dar algué(h)m (h) ^^^### T: não, é verdade. I:mh$

T: and nobody helped you orI: no (h), it’s difficu(h)lt there to he(h)lp someo(h)ne (h)^^^### T: no, it’s true. I: mh$

1 1

A: hh I: I got mad, I said, “okay, that’s how it is, I’m not gonna let this get to me/stress me out*f, (.) the day I need it, I’ll let you know, *f eh *f” (…) it’s not very+ serious.^

même+ pas quand t’arrives2 ici à une banque ou à la poste, si t’as2 pas ton numéro de compte, si tu2 l’as oublié. ils peuvent le rechercher*s avec ton nom, c’est pas un problème. là-bas, non. Ils savent pas ce que c’est .(11^) A: hh I: je m’suis énervée, j’ai dit, “bon, c’est comme ça, je vais pas me prendre la tête, *f (.) le jour où j’en aurai besoin euh je vous ferai signe, *f hein*f” (…) c’est pas très+ grave.^

APPENDIX F ISABEL’S OVERALL PROFILE Table F.1 Proportions of clauses in each speaker role: Isabel’s entire corpus French Narrator 37.2 (n = 406) Interlocutor 61.3 (n = 498) Character 28.0 (n = 306) Total clauses 100.0 (n = 1091)

Portuguese 60.4 (n = 353) 58.9 (n = 344) 14.7 (n = 86) 100.0 (n = 584)

Table F.2 Percentages of clauses in different registers in speaker’s “own” voice (narrator and interlocutory roles) French Portuguese Total clauses in Narrator and Interlocutor roles Unmarked Familiar High Vulgar Other language Total marked

100.0 (n = 785) 69.0 (n = 542) 15.7 (n = 123) 14.0 (n = 110) 2.8 (n = 22) 0.0 (n = 0) 31.0 (n = 243)

100.0 (n = 363) 75.5 (n = 274) 10.7 (n = 39) 14.9 (n = 54) 0.3 (n = 1) 0.8 (n = 3) 24.5 (n = 89)

Table F.3 Percentages of different interlocutory devices relative to all interlocutory devices French Portuguese Shifts to familiar Shifts to high Shifts to vulgar Shifts to other language

15.2 (n = 249) 13.8 (n = 169) 2.5 (n = 32) 0.0 (n = 0)

9.3 (n = 63) 12.8 (n = 72) 0.2 (n = 1) 0.6 (n = 3)

318 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

Total register shifts Intensifiers Second person Interjections Discourse markers Parentheticals Laughter Sighs Gasps

30.6 (n = 440) 17.9 (n = 212) 7.8 (n = 96) 0.8 (n = 10) 9.4 (n = 104) 32.9 (n = 363) 0.5 (n = 5) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.1 (n = 1)

25.7 (n = 154) 35.8 (n = 193) 1.7 (n = 9) 1.3 (n = 8) 8.2 (n = 44) 21.0 (n = 113) 6.3 (n = 34) 0.0 (n = 0) 0.0 (n = 0)

Table F.4 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation (C) in different speech registers across quoted characters French Portuguese All C(haracter) speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 206) (n = 32) Unmarked C 53.9 50.0 (n = 111) (n = 16) Familiar C 37.4 40.6 (n = 77) (n = 13) High C 6.8 9.4 (n = 14) (n = 3) Vulgar C 1.9 0.0 (n = 4) (n = 0) Other language C 0.0 0.0 (n = 0) (n = 0) Marked C total 46.1 50.0 (n = 95) (n = 16) Table F.5 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation of self (C1) in different speech registers French Portuguese All C(haracter)1 speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 152) (n = 23) Unmarked C1 50.0 52.2 (n = 76) (n = 12) Familiar C1 40.8 34.8 (n = 62) (n = 8) High C1 6.6 13.0 (n = 10) (n = 3) Vulgar C1 2.6 0.0 (n = 4) (n = 0)

ISABEL’S OVERALL PROFILE 319

Other language 1C Marked C1 total

0.0 (n = 0) 50.0 (n = 0)

0.0 (n = 0) 47.8 (n = 11)

Table F.6 Percentages of clauses of direct quotation of others (C3) in different speech registers French Portuguese All C(haracter) 3speech 100.0 100.0 (n = 54) (n = 9) Unmarked C3 64.8 44.4 (n = 35) (n = 4) Familiar C3 27.8 55.6 (n = 15) (n = 5) High C3 7.4 0.0 (n = 4) (n = 0) Vulgar C3 0.0 0.0 (n = 0) (n = 0) Other language C3 0.0 0.0 (n = 0) (n = 0) Marked C3 total 35.2 55.6 (n = 19) (n = 5)

INDEX

A accents (Portuguese) 182 Adler, M. 19 affective intensity 166, 205, 230–232 Agha, A 106, 151 Aldina 71 Alexandra 73 Álvarez-Cáccamo, C. 142 Ana listener's reaction to 161, 167 Portugal and 74 Portuguese language and 69, 73, 77 speaker role inhabitance and 172n5 story pair and 155, 162 vocabulary and identity and 72 Andreia 77, 79, 85n1 anger 80–83, 144 Antónia 78, 81 Aragno, A. 24 Armanda 154, 164, 167 Ayçiçegi, A. 143 B Babcock, B. A. 94 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 11, 124, 144, 237-238, 245 Bakhtin's notion of voicing 6, 13, 16, 25– 26, 92, 241 Barroso, A. F. 120, 147n2 Bauman, Richard 85n10, 94, 112n9 Beatriz 71, 77 Beaujour, E. 21 Bell, Ed 112n9 Benet-Martinez, V. 28 Benveniste, É. 12 Besemeres, M. 21 Besnier, N. 101–102, 146 Betancourt, H. 28 Bialystok, E. 20 bilhete de identidade 235–236n1 bilingual hybridity 33n6, 34n12 bilinguals. See also French and Portuguese languages

affective intensity and 166 Chinese-English 27–28, 30 couples 35n17 experiences of 1–4 identity gender and 21 language and 20, 151, 158–160 listener's perceptions of 163–168 monolingual nations states and 245 sociocultural 18 study of 31–32 memoirists 1, 20–22 memories and 24, 119–120, 147n2 performance interpretation and 246 persona and 17–18, 20, 21 personalities and 19, 20, 21, 28–31, 29 profanity and 71, 143, 148n11 psychological impact to 19–20 in psychotherapy 22–24 Russian-English 30–31 self-concept and 4, 11, 27–31, 32 self-presentation and 27–31, 35n18 self reports by 61–62 Spanish-English 28 Billiez, J. 85n5 bipolarity of reference 40 Blom, J. P. 17 Blommaert, J. 52, 144 Bond, M. H. 27–28, 35n15 Borillo, A. 95 bourgeois speech 160 Briggs, C. L. 85n10, 89 Buxbaum, E. 23–24, 34n9 C Cameron, D. 33n7 Capps, L, 33n7 Carreira, M. H. 95 Catarina 73, 76, 85n1 character (speaker role) aspects of 101–103 example of 113n14 extensiveness of 115–116, 118–119

322 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

original vs other language and 121 overview of 99–101 performance of 156, 186, 208n2, 214– 215 perspectives of 103 as primary speaker role 92 role combinations and 146–147n1 use of in each language 124, 141–143 characters, third person (in stories) 139, 166–168, 172–173n10, 173n13 Cheng,Yan-Ming 28 Chinese-English bilinguals 28, 30 Chiu, C. Y. 28 Clara 68, 73, 77, 155, 162, 167, 171n5 code-switching 17, 25–27, 34n11, 35n14 Cohen's Kappa 110 colloquial speech 140, 143 context 17–18, 20, 21, 73, 74–75, 244 courant speech 160–163 Crapanzano, V. 3, 4, 5, 32, 62, 64, 85n10 creative indexes 13, 14–15, 17 creative indexical switches 95 Cristina 80 Cunniff, M. K. 28 D déboublement du vocabulaire 106 Dewaele, J. M. 62, 120, 143, 148n11 Diebold, A. R. 19 Dionísio, A. Paiva 95 discourse markers 96, 128–131 double voice 93, 101–102, 207n2 Drescher M. 97, 147n8 Ducrot, O. 95 Duranti, A. 245 E Elena 75, 80 Emília 76, 81 Ervin-Tripp, Susan 29, 34n11 everyday speech 160–163 experimental studies 27–31 F familiar speech 160–163 familier speech 160–163 Fan, R. M. T. 30 Fillenbaum, S. 77 first-person pronouns 12, 15 Fleiss, J. L. 110 footing 111 formal speech 160–163

Foster, R. P. 23 French and Portuguese languages affective intensity in 166, 205, 230– 232 differences (intrinsic) in 69–70, 200– 201 evocative power of each 72–73, 225– 226 expressions of anger in 80–83 identity and 77–78, 234–235, 238– 241, 244 interpersonal relations and 73–74 linguistic competence and 234 personality shifts and 78–80, 202– 205, 235 profanity in 143, 160 quotation in 132–133, 136–138, 194– 198, 240 referential versus indexical accounts in 67–68 registers in 116–117, 125–128, 136– 141, 144–145, 241 relation of language to context in 74– 75 self-narration strategies in 124, 141 self-presentation in 35n18, 132–136, 141, 142, 245 sensations of speaking 76, 225–226 slang in 82–83 sociopragmatic differences 200–201 speaker roles in 119–124, 190 use of interlocutory devices in 128– 131 vocabulary differences in 66–67, 70– 72, 142–143, 199–200, 201, 225 voice and 77, 244 French language 44, 143, 201, 211, 246, 247. See also French and Portuguese languages French monolinguals 44, 245, 246 G Gabriel, Don 26, 92, 93 Gal, Susan 25, 69–70, 151, 163 Gardner, R. C. 77 gasps 97, 128–129 gender identity 21 Giles, H. 77 Gleason, J. 143 Goffman, E. 95, 104–105, 245 Green, Julien 20 Greenson, R. 22

INDEX 323

Grosjean, Francis 19–20, 21 Gumperz, J. 17, 25, 150, 245 Gustafson, D. J. 28 H Harris, C. 143 heteroglossia 6 Hill, J. 25–26, 92, 93, 142 Hill, K. 142 Hodgson, R. C. 77 Hong, Y. Y. 28 honorifics 181, 207n1 Hull, P. 29 hydraulic theory of anger 80 I identities bilinguals gender and 21 language and 20, 151, 158–160 listener's perceptions of 163–168 monolingual nations states and 245 sociocultural 18 study of 31–32 double 6 French and Portuguese languages and 77–78, 234–235, 238–241, 244 language and 6, 20, 151, 158–160, 163–168, 170 Luso-descendants and 6, 42–47, 52– 53, 246, 279 multiple 1, 4–5, 6 registers and 144–145 social 34n14, 40, 183 switching and 25–27 vocabulary and 72 indexes 12–16, 17, 95 indexical forms 14, 15–16 indexicality 15–16, 26, 34n9 indexical signs 12 initiative shifts 56, 95 intensifiers 95–96, 128–131 interactional particles 96 interjections 97, 128–129 interlocutor (speaker role) device repertoires and 128–131 example of 113n14 extensiveness of 115–116, 117–118 overview of 94 performance of 186, 208n2, 214–214 perspectives of 102–103 as primary speaker role 92–93

registers and 116–117, 125–128, 156 role combinations and 146–147n1 role repertoires and 124–125 use of in each language 141–143 interlocutory devices 94–99, 128–131, 187, 192–193, 218–219 interlocutory registers 116–117, 125– 128, 156 interviewers, peer 90 involvement (speaker) 166, 167, 173n12 Irene 154, 164, 165 Irvine, J. 69–70, 106, 151, 163, 205 Isabel background of 209–213 compared with Teresa 233–235, 243 French and Portuguese, use of 213– 226 listener's reaction to 164, 165, 226– 231 Portugal and 75 Portuguese language and 70–71, 76, 79 profile of (in study) 232 quotations and 219–223 registers and 215–223, 234–235 speaker involvement and 167 speaker role inhabitance and 171n5, 214–215 speaker roles, use of 236n2 story pair and 155, 162 J Jane 112n8, 244 Javier, R. A. 120, 147n2 jeune speech 160–163 Joana 154, 164, 165, 167, 168 Johnstone, Barbara 56, 177 Julia 48–51 K Kashima, T. 28 Kemmelmeiser, M. 28 Koven, Michèle 35n18, 124, 142, 205 Kulick, D. 33n7, 144–145 L Labov, W. 89, 95 Lacan, J. 33n7 Lacanian psychoanalytic theories 33n7 Lambert, W. E. 77 language attitudes 149–150

324 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

blending 34n12 choice of 34n14 context and 17–18, 20, 21, 73, 74–75, 245 cultural perspectives of 28 identity and 6, 20, 151, 158–160, 163– 168, 170 ideologies 85n10 persona and 25, 151, 158–160, 163– 168, 170 role in performance 119–124 Saussurean models of 12, 33n7 self and 3–4, 11, 12, 65–66 semiotic theory of 17 social indexicality and 34n9 language of response 35n15 laughter 97, 128–129 Law, J. S. F. 30 Linda differences between French and Portuguese for 68 expressions of anger by 80 language and experience and 65–66 listener's reaction to 164, 165 perception by others of 78 speaker involvement and 167 speaker role inhabitance and 171n5 story pair and 155, 162 listeners informal 151–153 method for research 151–154 perceptions of 163–171, 201–205, 226–230 reaction sessions (procedures) 156– 157, 201 reactions of 153–154, 155, 164, 165, 201–205, 226–231, 241 reactions to Ana 161, 167 reactions to Isabel 164, 165, 226–231 reactions to Teresa 164, 201–205 Lucy, J. 16 Luisa 81, 82–83 Luso-descendants aged personas and 47–52 bipolarity of reference and 40 French monolinguals and 44, 246 identities and 6, 42–47, 52–53, 245, 248 identity markers in 45, 247 Portuguese monolinguals and 44–45, 52, 245 profanity use and 145, 160

registers and 144–145, 247 social status and 40–42, 43 sociolinguistic presentations of self 56, 159 use of French language and 143, 211 Lutz, C. 205 M Margarida 68, 73, 75, 79 Maria 75, 76, 155, 162, 167, 171n5 Marian, V. 30–31 Marin, G. 28 Marina 68, 71 marked speech 56 matched-guise test 171n1 memoirists, bilingual 1, 20–22 memories 24, 119–120, 147n2 metanarration 94 metaphorical switches 17, 34n11, 56, 95 monolingual/monocultural assumptions 2 monolinguals assumptions and 2 bilinguals and 244–245 French 44, 245, 246 performance interpretation and 246 Portuguese 44–45, 52, 245, 246 Morris, M. W. 28 Munoz, M. A. 120, 147n2 N narrative activity 33n7, 124, 141, 155 narrator (speaker role) extensiveness of 115–116, 117–118 overview of 93–94 performance of 156, 186, 208n2, 214– 215 perspectives of 102–103 as primary speaker role 92–94 role combinations and 146–147n1 use of in each language 124, 141–143 nonreferential indexicality 15, 17. See also referential/nonreferential indexes O Oberwart 25 objective resources 66–67 Ochs, E. 33n7 P parenthetical remarks 94–95, 128–131 participants (in study) 53–56 Pavlenko, Aneta

INDEX 325

ambivalence toward bilingualism and 19 bilingualism, emotion, and selfhood and 33n4 bilingual memoirists and 21 bilinguals and monolinguals and 244– 245 language as agent to personality and 77 narrated memories and 120 self-reporting and 62 peer interviews 90 Peirce, C. 12 Peircean framework 12 persona aged 47–52 bilinguals and 17–18, 20, 21 language and 25, 151, 158–160, 163– 168, 170 multiple 24 profanity and 144–145 registers and 144–145 shifts in 18, 19, 21, 24 speaker roles and 92, 104–105 personalities bilinguals and 19, 20, 21, 28–31, 29 language and 29, 77 multiple 22 shifts in 17, 19, 21, 78–80, 202–205, 235 pet stories 112n6 Piller, I. 35n17 plots 158 Point, Le 42 Portuguese emigrants. See also Lusodescendants first generation 37–40 France and 37–42 Portugal and 39 second generation. See Lusodescendants social identities and 40, 183 social status and 43 Portuguese language. See also French and Portuguese languages accents in 182 Ana and 69, 73, 77 honorifics in 181, 207n1 Isabel and 70–71, 76, 79 monolinguals and 44–45, 52, 245, 246 profanity in 71 Portuguese monolinguals 44–45, 52, 245,

247 Powesland, P. 77 presupposing/creative indexes 13, 14–15, 17 profanity bilinguals and 143, 148n11 in French and Portuguese languages 143, 160 listener's perceptions of 160 Luso-descendants and 145, 160 persona and 144–145 self-quotation and 147n8 in two languages 71, 143, 148n11 pronouns 12, 15, 96–97, 128–129 psychopathology 19–20 psychotherapy 22–24 Q quotations of characters 100, 116–117, 132, 136– 141 colloquial speech and 140 as discursive strategy 15 French and Portuguese languages and 132–133, 136–138, 194–198, 240 Isabel's use of 219–223 profanity and 147n8 of self 139–141, 194–198 use of in original language 142 R race/racism 187–190, 208n4 Ralston, D. A. 28 referential/nonreferential indexes 13–14, 67–68. See also nonreferential indexicality registers coding of 107–111 French and Portuguese languages and 116–117, 125–128, 136–141, 144– 145, 241 identity and 144–145 interlocutory 116–117, 125–128, 156 Isabel's use of 215–223, 234–235 Luso-descendants and 144–145, 247 nonquoted speech and 105–110 perception of 160 persona and 144–145 quoted characters and 136–141 shifts in 95, 128–131, 147n4, 245, 246, 247 speaker roles and 92, 116–117, 125–

326 SELVES IN TWO LANGUAGES

128, 156 Teresa's use of 190–192, 234–235 reported speech 99–100, 142 Reyes, I, 34n11 Rita 154 Rosenberg, D. 5 Ross, M 30 Russian-English bilinguals 30–31 S Sapir, E. 77, 177 Saussurean models of language 12, 33n7 Schieffelein, B. 150 Schlachet, P. 24 Schrauf, R. 120 second-person pronouns 96–97, 128–129 self concept (bilinguals) 4, 11, 27–31, 32 concern with 3 empiricist view of 4 independent 3 indexicality and 15–16 language and 3–4, 11, 12, 65–66 Luso-descendants sociolinguistic presentations of 56, 159 in narrative 141 notions of 3 presentation (bilinguals) 27–31, 35n18, 141, 142, 244 quotation 147n8, 194–198 reporting 61–62 selfhood 11, 33n4 sense of 1 semiotic theory of language 17 Shokleng speakers 15 sighs 97, 128–129 Silverman, R. M. T. 30 Silverstein, M. 26, 62, 85n10, 106, 244 slang vocabulary 82–83 social identities 33n14, 40, 183 social indexicality 26, 34n9 Sofia 78, 81–82 soutenu speech 160–163 Spanish-English bilinguals 28 speaker involvement 166, 167, 173n12 speaker roles blending 124 character. See character (speaker role) coding scheme 243 double voice 101–102 framework 102–104 in French and Portuguese languages

119–124, 190 inhabitance Ana and 172n5 Clara and 172n5 description of 185 Isabel and 171n5, 214–215 Linda and 172n5 Maria and 172n5 role combinations and 146 in study 156, 171n5 Teresa and 171n5, 186–190 in two languages 124 interlocutor. See interlocutor (speaker role) Isabel's use of 236n2 narrator. See narrator (speaker role) personas in 92, 104–105 perspectives of 92, 102–103 registers 92, 116–117, 125–128, 156 speech bourgeois 160 character 99–101, 193–194 colloquial 140, 143 courant (everyday) 160–163 familier (familiar) 160–163 jeune 160 reported 99–100, 142 soutenu (formal) 160–163 vulgaire (vulgar) 160–163, 165, 172n10, 192, 201 stories (in study) 90–92, 112n6, 155, 162 Stroud, C. 35n14 studies, experimental 27–31 Susana 48–51, 79 T Taylor, C. 3 Teresa background of 178–184 compared with Isabel 233–235, 243 listener's reaction to 164, 201–205 registers and 190–192, 234–235 speaker involvement and 167 speaker role inhabitance and 171n5, 186–198 story pair and 155, 162 use of French and Portuguese by 68, 69, 81, 198–201, 205–207 third-person characters (in stories) 139, 166–168, 172n10, 173n13 Trafimow, D. E. S. 30

INDEX 327

U Urban, G. 15 Urciuoli, B. 33n12, 77, 150 V Van Dijk, Teun A. 208n4 Vanessa 48–51, 69, 75, 154, 164, 168 vocabulaire parallèle 106 vocabulary French and Portuguese languages and 66–67, 70–72, 142–143, 199–200, 201, 225 identity and 72 slang and 82–83 vulgar 201 voicing analysis of 111 Bakhtinian concept of 6, 13, 25–26, 92, 242 defined 150 differences in two languages 77, 241, 245 double 93, 101–102, 207n2 sociolinguistic 104–105, 237–238 Voloshinov, V. N. 3–4 vulgaire speech 160–163, 165, 172n10, 192, 201 vulgar speech 160–163, 165, 172n10, 192, 201 W White, G. 205 Wilson, A. E. 30 Woolard, K. 25–26, 33n12, 245 Wortham, S. 112n8, 124, 243 X Xun, W. Q. E. 30 Y Yang, K. S. 27–28, 35n15

In the series Studies in Bilingualism (SiBil) the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 35 Rocca, Sonia: Child Second Language Acquisition. xvi, 240 pp. Expected October 2007 34 Koven, Michèle: Selves in Two Languages. Bilinguals' verbal enactments of identity in French and Portuguese. 2007. xi, 327 pp. 33 Köpke, Barbara, Monika S. Schmid, Merel Keijzer and Susan Dostert (eds.): Language Attrition. Theoretical perspectives. 2007. viii, 258 pp. 32 Kondo-Brown, Kimi (ed.): Heritage Language Development. Focus on East Asian Immigrants. 2006. x, 282 pp. 31 Baptista, Barbara O. and Michael Alan Watkins (eds.): English with a Latin Beat. Studies in Portuguese/Spanish – English Interphonology. 2006. vi, 214 pp. 30 Pienemann, Manfred (ed.): Cross-Linguistic Aspects of Processability Theory. 2005. xiv, 303 pp. 29 Ayoun, Dalila and M. Rafael Salaberry (eds.): Tense and Aspect in Romance Languages. Theoretical and applied perspectives. 2005. x, 318 pp. 28 Schmid, Monika S., Barbara Köpke, Merel Keijzer and Lina Weilemar (eds.): First Language Attrition. Interdisciplinary perspectives on methodological issues. 2004. x, 378 pp. 27 Callahan, Laura: Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus. 2004. viii, 183 pp. 26 Dimroth, Christine and Marianne Starren (eds.): Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition. 2003. vi, 361 pp. 25 Piller, Ingrid: Bilingual Couples Talk. The discursive construction of hybridity. 2002. xii, 315 pp. 24 Schmid, Monika S.: First Language Attrition, Use and Maintenance. The case of German Jews in anglophone countries. 2002. xiv, 259 pp. (incl. CD-rom). 23 Verhoeven, Ludo and Sven Strömqvist (eds.): Narrative Development in a Multilingual Context. 2001. viii, 431 pp. 22 Salaberry, M. Rafael: The Development of Past Tense Morphology in L2 Spanish. 2001. xii, 211 pp. 21 Döpke, Susanne (ed.): Cross-Linguistic Structures in Simultaneous Bilingualism. 2001. x, 258 pp. 20 Poulisse, Nanda: Slips of the Tongue. Speech errors in first and second language production. 1999. xvi, 257 pp. 19 Amara, Muhammad Hasan: Politics and Sociolinguistic Reflexes. Palestinian border villages. 1999. xx, 261 pp. 18 Paradis, Michel: A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. 2004. viii, 299 pp. 17 Ellis, Rod: Learning a Second Language through Interaction. 1999. x, 285 pp. 16 Huebner, Thom and Kathryn A. Davis (eds.): Sociopolitical Perspectives on Language Policy and Planning in the USA. With the assistance of Joseph Lo Bianco. 1999. xvi, 365 pp. 15 Pienemann, Manfred: Language Processing and Second Language Development. Processability theory. 1998. xviii, 367 pp. 14 Young, Richard and Agnes Weiyun He (eds.): Talking and Testing. Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral proficiency. 1998. x, 395 pp. 13 Holloway, Charles E.: Dialect Death. The case of Brule Spanish. 1997. x, 220 pp. 12 Halmari, Helena: Government and Codeswitching. Explaining American Finnish. 1997. xvi, 276 pp. 11 Becker, Angelika and Mary Carroll: The Acquisition of Spatial Relations in a Second Language. In cooperation with Jorge Giacobbe, Clive Perdue and Rémi Porquiez. 1997. xii, 212 pp. 10 Bayley, Robert and Dennis R. Preston (eds.): Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Variation. 1996. xix, 317 pp. 9 Freed, Barbara F. (ed.): Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context. 1995. xiv, 345 pp. 8 Davis, Kathryn A.: Language Planning in Multilingual Contexts. Policies, communities, and schools in Luxembourg. 1994. xix, 220 pp. 7 Dietrich, Rainer, Wolfgang Klein and Colette Noyau: The Acquisition of Temporality in a Second Language. In cooperation with Josée Coenen, Beatriz Dorriots, Korrie van Helvert, Henriette Hendriks, Et-Tayeb Houdaïfa, Clive Perdue, Sören Sjöström, Marie-Thérèse Vasseur and Kaarlo Voionmaa. 1995. xii, 288 pp. 6 Schreuder, Robert and Bert Weltens (eds.): The Bilingual Lexicon. 1993. viii, 307 pp.

5 4 3 2 1

Klein, Wolfgang and Clive Perdue: Utterance Structure. Developing grammars again. In cooperation with Mary Carroll, Josée Coenen, José Deulofeu, Thom Huebner and Anne Trévise. 1992. xvi, 354 pp. Paulston, Christina Bratt: Linguistic Minorities in Multilingual Settings. Implications for language policies. 1994. xi, 136 pp. Döpke, Susanne: One Parent – One Language. An interactional approach. 1992. xviii, 213 pp. Bot, Kees de, Ralph B. Ginsberg and Claire Kramsch (eds.): Foreign Language Research in CrossCultural Perspective. 1991. xii, 275 pp. Fase, Willem, Koen Jaspaert and Sjaak Kroon (eds.): Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages. 1992. xii, 403 pp.