Leadership as Communicative Practice: The discursive construction of leadership and team identity in a New Zealand rugby team
by Nick Wilson
PhD Thesis, completed 2011
In sports teams, the way in which leaders such as coaches and captains communicate with players is vital to the... more
In sports teams, the way in which leaders such as coaches and captains communicate with players is vital to the success of the team. However, despite extensive psychological and sociological research on sport, it has rarely been a site of linguistic research. Like many sports, rugby has many traditions and ideologies that influence the way in which teams form identities. This thesis explores the way in which leadership is enacted and group identity forged through communicative practice in a New Zealand rugby team. Using authentic interactions collected through an ethnographic methodology, an analysis is presented of how discourse strategies are negotiated within the team, thus establishing practices that signify membership of communities of practice (CofPs) and create identities for individuals as leaders. Leadership discourse is itself viewed as a sociolinguistic practice and defines one of the CofPs within the team.
Using the concepts of front and back stage (Goffman 1959; Richards 2006) to describe different conceptual spaces in which interactions occur, this thesis suggests that discourse in the rugby team is a spatialised practice; the performance of a particular style of leadership constructs the space in which it takes place as public or private, with each contributing to an effective leadership performance. The construction of leadership identity is analysed in terms of stance and indexicality, linking locally constructed identities and discourse strategies to macro identity categories and socio-cultural ideologies. One of the ways in which this is examined is through the role of ritual and formulaic language in the team, showing that while communicative practice is negotiated in the back stage, in the front stage its performance serves to construct team identity while aiming to motivate the players. Furthermore, the structural nature of the game of rugby (i.e. players’ positional requirements) is examined in relation to the different communicative strategies adopted by positionally segregated groups. It is suggested that these groups, although institutionally defined, create meaning for themselves as CofPs by negotiating a shared way of communicating in enacting their role in the team.
In sum, this research uses CofP theory to examine how leaders emerge through their linguistic practices. Furthermore, it locates leadership as a spatialised practice and examines how leaders influence the discursive construction of group identity. Finally, the analysis also makes a valuable contribution to the field of sociolinguistic research on sport, a small yet growing area.
Stance in context: Affect, alignment and investment in the analysis of stancetaking
Paper given at the iMean2 conference in April 2011.
Stance has been used increasingly as an important theoretical and analytical term in the study of language and social... more Stance has been used increasingly as an important theoretical and analytical term in the study of language and social interaction. Most importantly, it has been deployed as a way to make connections between macro-level social identities and ideologies and what actually happens when people are talking to each other face to face. For all of this analytical success and fervor, stance is still a remarkably contested concept; it is still not clear that all researchers use the term in a similar way, and especially whether they agree on the linguistic resources a speaker can use to make a stance claim. In this paper I propose three main axes of stance and some linguistic resources for indicating these axes. While keeping in mind that stances are always negotiated and interactionally created in context, I propose three main axes: Alignment, affect, and investment. In order to demonstrate how these axes work, I consider how the word ‘just’ does alignment work in two conversations, considering how aspects of its contexts of use combine with its particular meaning and indexicalities to assert stance. I show how the single word modifies the three axes to differing degrees, and propose a heuristic for stance analysis.
Download (.pdf) Lexis, Discourse Prosodies and the Taking of Stance: A Corpus Study of the Meaning of ‘Self-proclaimed’
Candidate level essay in English linguistics at the Södertörn University Institution for Culture and Communication
This study is concerned with the description of the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the attributive... more
This study is concerned with the description of the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the attributive adjective self-proclaimed, employing corpus-linguistic methodology to explore its meaning from user-based data. The initial query provided the material from which a lexical pro-file of the target word was constructed, systematically describing collocational data, semantic preferences, semantic associations and discourse prosodies. Qualitative analysis of sample con-cordances illustrated the role of the target word in expressing different kinds of meaning-bearing stances. The results demonstrate the importance of context and communicative functionality as constraints determining meaning, determining the discourse prosodies of self-proclaimed as one of either negation; accepted-positive and accepted-negative. Further, the analysis of self-proclaimed as a stance marker indicates the linking evaluative meanings of extended lexical units to the project of linguistic description of intersubjective stancetaking as a possibly fruitful venue for research
Patterns of Age-Based Linguistic Variation In American English.
Published in Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(1), pp. 58-88.
In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it... more In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it ‘has not yet been explicitly studied as a sociolinguistic variable’ (Eckert 1997: 167). Consequently, little is knows about how language varies across the life span. The present study employs key word analysis on a large corpus of casual conversation in American English to explore age-based linguistic variation in spontaneous conversation. Analyses of the key words point to two major patterns of age-based lexico-grammatical variation: use of slang, and use of stance and involvement markers. Younger speakers’ talk is characterized by an unusually frequent use of slang and swear words, and by a marked use of features indexing speaker’s stance and emotional involvement, including intensifiers, stance adverbs, discourse markers, personal pronouns, and attitudinal adjectives; older speakers favor modals. These patterns are suggestive of functional differences in the discourse of youth and adults. It is argued that the expression of personal stance is more explicit and plays a key role in younger speakers’ discourse.