Stance, Style, and the Linguistic Individual

Repeatable linguistic styles emerge out of stancetaking strategies that prove repeatedly relevant and useful for particular speakers in particular kinds of interactions.Previous research has explored how styles can come to be associated with interactional situations (e.g.Biber and Finegan 1989) or social identities (eg.Ochs 1992, Eckert 2000).In some sociocultural contexts, styles associated with individuals can also become ethnographically and interactionally relevant, although we have paid less attention to these.This paper uses a discourse-analytic case study of one individual's talk and writing across genres, together with ethnographic, biographical, and historical research about the sociolinguistic and language-ideological contexts, to illustrate how repeated patterns of stancetaking can come together as a style associated with a particular individual.The individual in question, a well-known 20th-century U.S. political figure, was known for how she talked, which was sometimes referred to as "the Barbara Jordan style."As I will show, Jordan drew on discursive resources from the African-American church and from the American traditions of legal and political debate and oratory, as mediated by particular people in her environment, to create a linguistic style that she adopted across discourse genres.In keeping with one of the two the dominant Western ideologies about the role of identity in persuasion, this style worked rhetorically by forthcoming in Alexandra Jaffe (ed.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on Stance.