- There is an interesting shift in speech styles when the professor begins to quote
the Indiana company: “Listen, we got this law in Indiana... ” This shift does arguably
serve a pedagogical function: to keep students engaged through a more vivid rendition of
the hypothetical exchange. But it also seems to signal a change from “professor speak” to
the language of the “man on the street,” conveying a sense that we are moving out of a
classroom and listening in on “real” talk. As we move further into the turn, the professor
slides back into a more formal legal-pedagogical register, using phrases like “common-
wealth of Indiana” and “can be made subject to Indiana’s law.” Interestingly, when we begin
to hear the defendant company’s voice, there is once more a shift to a more informal style:
“Forget that, I don’t do business here.” - The student actually employs an interesting hybrid quotation form to re-present
the response of the plaintiff. He begins with the form usually associated with indirect quota-
tion (“the seller [con]tends that”). Use of “that” (a syntactic subordinator) is generally ac-
companied by subordination of the remaining part of the quotation to the quoting frame,
with predictable shifts in deictics. Instead, the student then produces a quotation that is at
first ambiguous, but proceeds into a directive that is clearly in direct quotation form (“allow
the personal jurisdiction”). The resulting quotation contains an intriguing combination of
analytic remove—making us aware of the student’s voice—and immediacy (albeit an im-
mediacy that would not work well in actual dialogue with the court, as it employs a style gen-
erally used by higher status interlocutors to lower status ones). By the end of the turn, the
student has shifted to indirect quotation to represent the language of the contractual clause
in question, permitting a nested hierarchy of quotation styles within the short turn that marks
offquoted speech within quoted speech: the student quoting the plaintiff quoting the contract. - Silverstein, personal communication, 9/23/05.
- Id.
- See discussion in Chapter 4, note 42. Interestingly, it seems that the most coop-
erative turn-taking in the modified Socratic classrooms approaches this ideal more closely
than does the more antagonistic discussion found in prototypical Socratic pedagogy. Breaks
in the monologic voice are more common when professors do not work as hard to
coproduce a smooth narrative. Minimally, continued negative uptake (such as that seen
in Transcripts 4.2 and 4.3) indexes a discordant voice that does not fit into the planned
narrative stream. When students cannot produce the desired responses, their voices quickly
emerge as distinct from that of the (sometimes increasingly overtly frustrated) professor.
Even in the smoothest of coproduced Socratic narratives, one can generally discern a mini-
mal distinction between the voices that emerge from the interplay of “teacher who is ex-
perienced in using this discourse” and “student who is awkwardly attempting to enter a
new discourse,” often evidenced through quite subtle linguistic features. (And, minimally,
through pronominal shifts, as in “What would you argue... ?” and “I would argue that.
... ”) Furthermore, as noted, the professors sometimes introduced distinct voices and
accompanying shifts in footing into the smoothly coordinated exchanges during role-plays
and hypotheticals. Thus the overall picture is quite complex. - Again, even in the most seamless of direct examinations we generally find the
residual difference in footing indicated by the deictic difference inherent in basic pronomi-
nal usage (Attorney: “Did you... ?”; Witness: “I did... ”; etc.), which identify one voice
as the “author-ized” source of key information, and the other as the conductor in charge
of the flow of talk. And there are often more marked shifts, as when an attorney comments
from his or her distinctive perspective on the narrative emerging from the client during
direct examination. - See Ochs and Schieffelin, “Language Socialization and Acquisition”; Ochs, intro-
duction; Schieffelin, The Give and Take of Everyday Life.
Notes to Pages 107–110 251