Abstract
Barbara Johnstone is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a leading figure in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics and served as the editor of Language in Society from 2005 to 2013. The following interview was conducted via Skype and email during the latter part of June 2015. The text of the interview has been lightly edited for general coherence and continuity.
The first question I have is about all the interrelated topics that you’ve worked on over the course of your career. I’m curious what your favorite projects have been.
I’ve always been interested in the individual and in place—and, of course, in language. That’s why I’m a linguist. I think those three interests are woven into pretty much all of my work except for my dissertation work, which was more in the language and culture mode (Johnstone 1991). I think my three favorite projects as whole projects, not just as writing projects but as research projects, have been the three that have come out of the three places I’ve lived, the Fort Wayne one (Johnstone 1990), the Texas one (Johnstone 1999), and the Pittsburgh one (Johnstone 2013), because in each case, the project emerged out of trying to make sense out of where I was living. They were all in a way for me place-making projects.
Did you see them as ethnographic projects?
Yes, they’re ethnographic in different ways. I’d say they get more ethnographic as they go along, partly because I’ve just spent longer and longer each time and been more self-conscious about the ethnographic aspects of them. It’s loose ethnography. It’s not the kind of ethnography that an anthropologist would consider full-fledged, but I think there’s more of that as I go along. There’s more of that kind of thing in the Pittsburgh project where you actually go out and ask people in a systematic set of questions or you try to make a certain kind of situation happen so you can observe it. I wasn’t doing that so much in the previous two projects.
What would you want people to take theoretically from those three projects?
Well, one thing is about place as a social and linguistic construct. Of course my interest in it is mostly in place as a discursive construct. People make places in talk, and that’s one of the really important things they do in talk. It’s a kind of identity work that is as important as any other in many contexts.
Although that was already the focus in Fort Wayne, I’ve become more and more sociolinguistic, in the sense of being more and more interested in variation and the details of variation. I didn’t think of myself as a sociolinguist at all when I started out. I was a discourse analyst. I never took a course in sociolinguistics. Penny Eckert arrived at the University of Michigan after I’d already finished coursework and she wasn’t in the same department anyway, so I just remember seeing her a few times. And Pete Becker didn’t think of himself as a sociolinguist. There really wasn’t anyone who did, so I had no claim to that designation at all until I moved to Texas A&M and I met Guy Bailey there. He turned me on to how cool it was to think about regional variation and social variation.
Bailey had worked on the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (Pederson 1988) when he was in graduate school and he was studying Texas speech and doing the project with Trish Cukor-Avila in what they call Springville (Cukor-Avila & Bailey 1996). I just got more and more interested in drilling down to those sorts of details and seeing how you could use discourse analysis to enrich your explanations of the kinds of patterns you were finding. I actually remember going to my very first sociolinguistics conference in 1990, a Methods in Dialectology conference in British Columbia, and feeling like I was a person from Mars.
Do you think that’s what got you interested in methods more broadly?
I don’t know. I think I was always interested in methods. I think maybe I started to think of myself as being interested in methods when I was asked to write a book about methods, qualitative methods (Johnstone 2000b). Then when I came to Carnegie Mellon, I was very explicitly asked to teach about methods. The discourse analysis course that I have been teaching here is really discourse analysis as a method for rhetorical inquiry. That’s why these students need it and that’s what they use it for. I can’t present it as a subfield of linguistics. If I did it wouldn’t work very well. Students would think it was irrelevant.
Do you also teach sociolinguistics as linguistics at CMU?
Sometimes, but more to undergraduates because we have a linguistics major and a minor. So, I’ve been able to work sociolinguistics in. For a while I taught an actual course called Introduction to Sociolinguistics but then I realized that was ridiculous. It was way too broad and way too superficial. Maybe if you were in a linguistics department you would need a course like that, but my students didn’t need to show they’d had an introduction to sociolinguistics, and nothing could have a prerequisite anyway. So then I started teaching more targeted courses that could introduce big chunks of sociolinguistics but where I didn’t feel responsible to cover that whole field. I developed a course called Discourse and Identity and a course called American English, which was mostly about variation, and a course on the rhetoric of place where I can talk a lot about language. That’s the way I’ve brought in sociolinguistics.
Do you assign your own work in those courses?
Not very much of it. You can’t, really. It doesn’t work very well. Students just aren’t going to discuss it the same way. They’re not going to be critical of it.
Do you find that’s true of graduate students, too?
Yes, mostly. They won’t grapple with it in the same way. I think it’s just generally the case that your own colleagues and your own students are the people who are least likely to know what your actual standing is in your field. One of my students will go to some conference and find out that people know who I am and he’ll be so surprised.
Which do you like better, writing books or writing articles?
I think I like both for different reasons. I like writing articles because the size of the argument is more manageable. I think very much like a rhetorician, probably more so since I started teaching courses to people in rhetoric. But I think I’ve always thought about any writing project as an argument that you’re trying to make. And, you know, when you’re writing an article, you need to be able to state what that argument is and how you’re going to support it right up front. It can be a struggle, but once you have that framing done, then it’s pretty straightforward, assuming that you’ve done the analysis and have the right data and everything to make that argument.
Whereas a book usually comes out of a set of article-length things that you’ve been doing, or at least some of the chapters end up being from that. So then you have to make an argument out of all that stuff, and that can be a little harder and a little more diffuse. In the Pittsburgh book (Johnstone 2013), there were two parts really, two aspects to the argument. The book is subtitled “The Story of a Dialect,” and that reflects the way in which a book, unlike an article, has to tell a coherent story. In the first part of the book, I was both describing the history of Pittsburghese and making the argument that the intellectual frameworks I was using—a discursive approach to place and identity, the idea of orders of indexicality, a multidisciplinary kind of historiography—were the best ways to understand that history. The second part is a set of case studies of interactional practices in which people circulate the set of ideas that constitutes Pittsburghese. The argument in this part of the book is that Pittsburghese has always been shaped by the rhetorical and material constraints and affordances of the situations in which people talk about it and represent it in other ways. I’m hoping that the fact that I thought about what I was doing both as a set of arguments and as a story means that it doesn’t seem like a series of reprinted journal articles, even though lots of the pieces of the book were journal articles in their past lives.
Another thing about writing a book is that the audience is different—usually quite a bit larger and broader in disciplinary terms—than the audience for a journal article. So you have to write in a more accessible, less technical style. I usually find that this means I have to rewrite everything, even the parts that are based on journal articles. A book is a looser form, so that can make it nicer in a way but also harder. They’re different, just different.
A subset of my books is textbooks, and that’s a whole different process. I like that kind of writing, too. I’ve done a lot of that. That’s not so much about making an argument as about being absolutely clear and knowing exactly what you’re talking about. You can’t write a good textbook otherwise.
Are you able to reveal what the book proofs are that you’re working on now?
It’s a book about Pittsburgh speech with only a little bit about the Pittsburghese phenomenon. It’s for a series that was started by Edinburgh and now it’s been taken over by De Gruyter called Dialects of English (http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/181615). There’ve been books about British dialects, Singapore, New York, and so on, and they all have pretty much the same format. You have a chapter of context—history and demography—and then you have a phonetics and phonology chapter, morphosyntax, lexis, and discourse. We have a chapter on African American English in Pittsburgh because that’s different and needs its own chapter. And then at the end there’s a chapter about history and trajectory, and that’s where the Pittsburghese stuff is fitting into this book.
What do you think is the most compelling thing theoretically about the Pittsburgh project?
Two things, I think. First of all, something that really predates it but got me thinking about it is what’s the best way to think about place in sociolinguistics. That goes back to about 2004, when I first started reading some stuff in geography and realizing there was a way to talk about what I’d already noticed, namely that place is a cultural and discursive construct. I think that resonated with the variationists, because in a way it was kind of the next step after Penny Eckert (2000) pointing out that gender was socially constructed, which was a big deal. I said, “Well, so is place. Instead of just ditching the old regional dialectology we can put it on some firmer theoretical feet.”
At the same time, other people were getting interested in place in variation studies from other, slightly different perspectives. Dave Britain (2010) was doing some work using other brands of geography and then there’s John Nerbonne (2009) and all the big-data dialectologists. There was an interest in place and how to theorize place for variation study from various perspectives that came together, which meant that it was okay to talk about region again. Labov’s (1962) very early work was about place: the Martha’s Vineyard work was about how people experience place. But then after that it was all about urban places where supposedly the only thing that was important was social class and ethnicity.
The other thing was bringing semiotic theory to bear on showing how this happened, by means of talking about indexicality, enregisterment and orders of indexicality (Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson 2006; Johnstone and Kiesling 2008). I think that has had some influence, although it’s hard to say. I mean a lot of people are trying to use those ideas.
And how do you see those ideas around questions of place intersecting with your interest in style?
I don’t really know that I would say I’m interested in style per se. Not in the sense that Penny Eckert is (2008). I mean style can mean so many different things. I think I’m still interested in individual styles, but what I’m thinking about more now is individuals’ experiences. What I seem to be working on now is how individuals experience the sociolinguistic world. I think a lot of my more recent work, and what I’m struggling with right now, is about thinking about very individual, very material aspects of the sociolinguistic situation.
For example, a student and I are working on two different online conversations about Pittsburgh speech. One group is people who were the baby boomers who left Pittsburgh in the 1980s, the Pittsburgh diaspora, writing about Pittsburgh speech, and the other group is this new very hipsterish group, in a discussion they have about Pittsburgh speech, and they have overlapping but interestingly different ideas about it. So what I think we want to do is show that these are both the result of mobility, but very different experiences of mobility, under different material and economic circumstances. So in a way bringing the material back into language ideology because often what’s stressed are the ideological aspects of experience rather than the material aspects. If you think about things from the perspective of the individual’s experiences walking through the day, how do different people actually experience the sound of local speech? So, I guess I haven’t really been working on individual styles for a while but I’m still interested in the individual.
I think people do think of your work as connected to the conversations about style. You said that you don’t think about style in the way that someone like Penny Eckert does. One difference is what you just said about materiality and the actual individual experience but are there other ways that you see your thinking about style as different from other ways style is talked about?
I think that the temptation is always to think about style*s* in the plural and to think that there are styles while fully realizing at the same time that they are shifting and changing and emergent, and to think that there is a style associated with a group of people. I think of people working on style, I probably fall closest to Nick Coupland (2007) in my interest in how particular individuals use bits of various repertoires to do something very situated, very in-the-moment, very rhetorical. Something designed for the immediate circumstance as opposed to regularly using things from a more stabilized repertoire to repeatedly do something to move yourself into a certain identity that’s then a bit more perduring, like being a burnout or being a jock or whatever.
What do you see as the relationship between those very individual experiences and being able to generalize away from them or generalize about them?
People want to generalize, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the question is, where is the reality, where are things really happening? I realize that’s a loaded thing to say, but I think that the styles that people talk about, and that you can reflect about, emerge out of things people do in very specific contexts for very specific reasons. I don’t know how familiar you are with the idea of emergent grammar, Paul Hopper’s work (1987). I think styles emerge the same way grammars emerge, which means that they don’t have much ontological status. They are the result of looking back on what’s really an ongoing process.
A style might be sometimes how somebody experiences something. You might look at someone wearing a certain thing and say, “Oh, they are a whatever,” but that is the result of being able to reflect back on a bunch of experiences that you’ve already had. So, I guess I’ve moved more and more towards the linguistics of the particular, the linguistics of particularity. What’s real are things that are happening in the moment for particular reasons. We’re human so we can generalize and reflect but we’re not doing anything different as linguists than the people we’re studying are doing when they reflect back on their experience and say, “Oh, she doesn’t speak very good French” or “She looks like a geek.”
If you were going to assign one thing that you’d written that captured what you’re most committed to or proud of, what would it be?
I think in most cases, I would probably assign what’s been cited the most of anything which is that 2006 paper that you published in the Journal of English Linguistics (Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson 2006). I mean to me some of the work that’s closest to my heart is about the linguistic individual (Johnstone 1996, 2000a), but that just hasn’t really gotten quite the uptake. People can’t figure out quite what to do with it. The only people who’ve really latched on to that work are some of the forensic linguists. They have found that people do have distinctive styles and distinctive voices. I think different people have different linguistic fingerprints. I think what they like is I’m providing a theoretical justification for saying that. Because that’s what they need to have. There’s something kind of at odds between that work and the agenda of sociolinguistics. I mean there’s something that’s so humanistic about that work that it doesn’t really fit with social science very much where you have to generalize away from the individual.
You teach now in a department in which your area of the graduate program is primarily geared toward rhetoric. You were trained mostly as a discourse analyst. You also see yourself as a sociolinguist. How do you see rhetoric, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics interacting both for you personally and more generally in the field?
Well, first of all, thinking about sociolinguistics and rhetoric, if people in sociolinguistics thought more rhetorically they could see some things that sometimes they miss. Rhetoricians tend to think about intention, which I think is often thrown out like the baby with the bathwater in sociolinguistics. Sure, we do things a lot less because of our plans and intentions than we culturally think we do, but still. . . . And rhetoricians think about the in-the-moment effects, the way that speech is designed to do something, to make something happen, to change someone’s mind, to have an effect in the world. So they’re less likely to think about people as completely constrained by outside forces, which is traditionally the way sociolinguists think about people, where you do what you do because that’s the only thing you can do.
On the other hand, rhetoricians could learn a lot from discourse analysts and sociolinguistics about the importance of linguistic detail, the importance of doing analyses that are not just paraphrases or the traditional kind of literary analysis or that aren’t just theory driven. The importance of really, really taking your data seriously and even calling it data, which is horrifying for some people. And working upward from the material, looking at how the little tiny details make a difference, like what word you choose or what grammatical structure you choose.
I think people in our program are pretty well aware of that because we have a history of doing this kind of micro-rhetoric or “rhetoric in detail” (Johnstone & Eisenhart 2008). People elsewhere often think we’re the ones from outer space. We show up at the Rhetoric Society of America and they think, “Well, why would you do this? You can tell what this means, you don’t have to dig into it this way.” But how do you know what this means? How can you tell what this means? It’s because of the details; it’s because of exactly what’s here and what’s not here. We’re looking at things in a much more pixelated way than they are.
Where do you see conversational analysis fitting in?
That’s an interesting question, because I like the idea that turns in conversation are designed for the moment, to fit in with what’s going on. But I don’t like the idea that there’s nothing else going on, that people aren’t bringing to bear things they already know. I mean, after all, you’re speaking in a language, and that’s something you already know. I think that the really doctrinaire, Schegeloff-type conversation analysis that doesn’t bring in anything except the turn-by-turn design of talk is missing the whole culture boat, but I like the level of detail in it.
Since this is an interview for the Journal of English Linguistics (JEngL), what do you think about that kind of specialist approach and talking about English linguistics specifically?
Most of my work has been about English, but I don’t think of myself as an English linguistics person. My questions are not about how English is different from other languages, for example. After all, my first linguistic research project, for my dissertation, was about Arabic (Johnstone 1991) and that’s still proving useful to many people. So, I don’t think that I’m interested in the details of how English got to be different from other languages or how English is different from other languages or how to teach English, which I know JEngL isn’t particularly interested in either. English is my case study, really, I’d say. I’ve had to be the linguist in an English department a couple of times but that’s not how I’m seen at Carnegie Mellon. Here, I’m seen as a member of the rhetoric faculty. One thing that’s great about working where I do is I’m not just the service person.
That’s very nice. I agree that’s not always the case. Especially for people who are linguists in English departments, the linguist is left to do the language work.
But you can do whatever you want, really, in an English department. I mean there’s some freedom in being a kind of outsider, because you don’t have to toe the line of your colleagues in the way someone in cultural studies or traditional kinds of rhetoric does. On the other hand, you’re marginalized in other ways.
That leads to another question given the editorial work you did on Language in Society. If we take sociolinguistics in the broad sense, where do you see sociolinguistics going at the moment and do you think there is more or less interaction among people doing different kinds of sociolinguistics?
I think that’s an interesting thing to think about. One thing that has happened all along is that there has always been a distinction between the sociolinguists who are mostly interested in language and the sociolinguists who are mostly interested in society and people. They’re often doing the same thing, but for different reasons. I think that is a growing split. There are people like Labov who have always been interested in language and language change and who just don’t get or have no interest in people who are interested in power and solidarity and discrimination and politics and that kind of thing.
I think most critical discourse analysts are not interested in language. They’re not interested in language theory. They don’t have a theory of language and they sometimes don’t know anything about where the theories of language that they draw on come from. And then there are language-y variationists who don’t think enough about where their social theory comes from. So, there’s a kind of blindness on both sides. Often people just don’t realize that they are asking different questions and have different concerns.
What do you think was the most interesting or fun thing you learned while you were editing Language in Society?
I wouldn’t say this was the most fun, but one thing I really learned was how important it is for people to learn to make arguments and how often in linguistics and anthropology people don’t learn that, or they haven’t learned that by the time they are writing their first article. They don’t understand that an article has to make a clear argument. I think they just want to smush their whole dissertation into a piece of writing. I learned a lot about how to show people how to make an argument. You don’t show people how to do that by saying, “Well, bring out your key argument.” You have to do it by saying, “Your argument is this” or “Your argument should be this, which means that this, this, this and this are extraneous and the kinds of support you need are this, this, this and this.”
I was very hands-on as an editor, very directive and very direct. I found that was really helpful to people. They liked that kind of directness. They didn’t like the sort of waffley kind of responses that you get from some editors: “Here’s what the reviewers say, do something about it.” What I enjoyed most about being a journal editor was working with the more junior authors who were just publishing for the first time, because they were just much more open to suggestion and I could help them a lot more.
Did you try to privilege their work some?
Yeah, yeah, I did favor the younger authors or the newer authors I think. Some of the more senior authors were just a pain to work with sometimes. Some of them thought they were doing you a favor by sending you something, or in some cases they weren’t thinking about whether it’s fair to publish so often in the same journal. Maybe step back and let other people have a chance.
Yeah, I think it’s this very interesting balance of people wanting to stay in the game but then also recognizing that there are a lot of people who want to come in.
Yeah, I know. You see that in journal editing. You see that in people not retiring when they should. I’m actually half retired now. My university is doing everything it can to make retirement seem appealing to people. So, I’m on a four-year plan. I’m going to be fully retired in three more years. One of the reasons for that is I need to step aside and let some new scholars in.
Do you find you’re getting more writing done?
In fits and starts I probably am. I’m certainly getting more reading and thinking done. That’s the main thing. I have more time to really think through things, and, I think, as a result, the things that I’m doing are better. Nothing that I’ve done in the last year, and it’s only been one year, has felt dashed off or like “I don’t have time to do this, so I’m just going to send it in the way it is.”
What kinds of things do you think have changed since you entered the profession?
Well, I can even go further back because I was raised in an academic family. My mother was a faculty wife and I’m a faculty member. That’s a big change. My mother gave up her career to have children and follow my dad even though she was working toward a PhD. That just doesn’t happen anymore. There are couples in which the man is working and the woman is staying home, but she’s not expected to do the faculty wife thing anymore. She’s not expected to have the parties and serve cocktails and proofread and copyedit her husband’s work and all that. At the same time, there are more and more really strong women who marry men who end up more in the support role, or they have partners who are. In the humanities, there are more women than men now and it was just the opposite when I started. I have many, many peers who didn’t have children or didn’t get married, or both, or had only one child, and that’s less the case with younger women in academia. So, the gender thing has changed. Not yet to the extent it should across the university. There are still not enough women in science and engineering and so on.
We have less clerical support. When I started there were actually secretaries who would type your letters. We have to be our own secretaries now. We have to be our own word processors. We have to be our own envelope stuffers and that kind of thing. We do a lot more of our own clerical work than we did. But on the other hand, we have a lot more other kinds of resources. People complain about how the university libraries have gotten worse, but when you think about all the stuff we can get now through the Internet, it’s amazing. That’s been a big change. I started doing word processing when I was still very much at the beginning of my career. I got my first computer at four years in, so really it’s been pretty much a gradual process of getting more and more connected that way.
The disturbing thing about universities that’s become more clear probably since the nineties is this neoliberal economic-values-based discourse about universities where professors are not at the center of universities anymore. The people who run the university are the development office. I’m being very cynical about this; I don’t actually mean that, but there is much more top-down management that has created a managerial class and a teaching class more and more. That’s replacing the system where professors were at the center of things and might become managers in the form of department heads or associate deans for a while but they wouldn’t thereby join a different culture and take on a whole new set of values and learn a whole new vocabulary.
Any other changes?
I think it’s important to note that I had a big leg up because my dad was a professor. I think I probably would not have been able to do what I did nearly as easily and maybe not as successfully if I had not had the model of my father to look at; my parents not wondering what the heck I was doing being a teacher, my dad encouraging me to be interested in linguistics even before I knew what it was, just knowing what academia was like. I’ve always been able to sort of see what was going on structurally because I grew up in this environment. That has helped me understand why things were working the way they were. That’s important. There are more and more second-generation academics now than there used to be. That’s another big change. My first couple of jobs there were very few second-generation academics, and you could really tell the difference between those of us who had grown up in this world and those who hadn’t. You just have a head start.
There are a lot of second- and third-generation academics at the University of Michigan and you’re right, you can really see the difference between them and those of us who aren’t. It’s Bourdieu’s habitus right in action.
Yeah, right. You’re just comfortable and you understand what’s going on. Even though as a beginning assistant professor you still have a lot to understand. On the other hand, I mean this is just minor, but my parents, whenever I sent them anything of mine after a certain point, they would send it back with corrections in red. I just wanted to say, “No, you’re supposed to say, ‘We’re so proud of you, dear’!” But no, they sent back corrections in red. Good grief! So, after a while I quit sending them things.
If you were starting now, would you still want to go into this as a profession?
Well, if I’d gotten really, really good advice, I would say probably not. Because giving somebody good advice these days is saying don’t go to graduate school in our fields. That’s just the way it is. Most people don’t do that. I do it: I’ve given a few people a really hard line, you know, “If I were your mother, I would say, ‘Do not do this. You’re making a mistake. This is a bad career choice. You are probably not going to get the kind of job you think you’re gonna get if you get a job at all.’” People say they appreciate that, but then they still go to graduate school, so. . . .
I don’t know what I would have ended up doing. It’s just really hard to say. It’s hard to imagine having grown up in a different time than you have. I think it’s very possible that I wouldn’t be a linguist if I’d grown up later. I would be doing something else. I was always good at languages and have been successful as a linguist, but I think I might have ended up being a scientist if I had grown up in a different time. I was also very interested in that, always messing around with things in the basement. I remember trying to figure out how to make soap and things like that.
Well, you know, you made me a linguist. So, I’m glad you didn’t grow up in a different time.
That’s what you say.
It’s totally true. You taught the very first linguistics course I took. I didn’t know what linguistics was and then took that very first course and I think you had me hooked in two weeks.
That’s amazing. I mean I’m very glad. I think that’s a good thing. But, you had to take the course, right? You were a German major at Georgetown University.
Right, I was a German major and I did have to take the course. I wanted to do translation. But I had never heard of the field or thought about language as something general in that way. It was a long time ago, so maybe I’m misremembering but I don’t think so. I can very much remember within about two weeks that sense of “This is the thing that I want to do.”
That’s great. Well, I knew what I wanted to do but at first it wasn’t linguistics. I took an Intro to Linguistics course that was just deadly, and it wasn’t what I was interested in. I’d been studying French in high school, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was interested in language and culture. I’d read Whorf (Carroll, Lee & Levinson 2012) in high school; my dad gave me his copy of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s essays. He also gave me a book, an introduction to language that would seem hilariously out of date now. I don’t even remember the author, but it was a popular linguistics book. I knew I was interested in language. But then when I took linguistics, I thought “This is just really dry. This is not what I want to do at all.”
Well, you took that lesson to heart because when you taught it, that’s not what you did. In fact you started with the cultural aspects. I remember you started talking about a cockroach and how the cockroach was interacting in some way with you but how that was clearly very different from how you were interacting with us, as humans using language.
Oh, boy, that brings me back to that apartment in Washington. Back when I was interacting with cockroaches. Fortunately that has not happened for quite a while!
You talked a little bit about Guy Bailey as a mentor when you got to Texas A&M and that you missed Penny Eckert as a mentor here at the University of Michigan and then you mentioned Pete Becker. What do you think about the influence various mentors have had on your career?
One important one was Pete Becker. I came to Michigan after having been teaching in Germany for a year and a half and thought that I was just going to get a master’s in applied linguistics and then go back to Europe and get a better job, because that was the credential you needed. And then I took Pete’s course, which was called Language and Culture, and that was what I’d really been looking for all along, that approach. The Discourse Analysis course I teach and the book I wrote (Johnstone 2008) were, oddly, very much based on that course, even though they’re not about language and culture. Pete was systematically thinking about different sources of constraint on discourse, different sources of constraint and possibility. And then I sat in on the course again as grader one year when he was doing this as part of a writing intensive program.
What I learned from him was to think of discourse analysis as a set of methods, a kind of heuristic set of questions to ask. All tied up together with that is the importance of particularity. At the beginning of class he would write on the board one sentence in Burmese, which was one of the languages he studied, and he spent the whole class unpacking it, looking at all the different reasons why it ends up being exactly this way. Why is this sentence exactly this way? It has something to do with the Burmese language, obviously, and what you can put where in a sentence. It has something to do with the way Burmese is written. It has something to do with language ideology, something to do with ideas about the world. He just unpacked the sentence, showing how much there was to learn from a single thing. Another one I remember was the weather report from the Ann Arbor paper. We spent a whole class period pulling that apart, looking at its structure and the prior texts that it evoked and the audience that it constructed and presupposed. That whole approach I learned from him.
What I didn’t learn from him was how to work with graduate students. In fact he was a very bad example of how to work with graduate students. Not in the sense of being an intellectual mentor. He was very good at that. Once you were talking to him, he would be really inspiring. He would work to draw out what you had to say. But, you’d have to wait in the hall for hours, and he sometimes didn’t keep appointments.
So, as far as that end of things, I’ve learned to do just the opposite. I’ve been a very effective graduate advisor, so say many students. I am very hands-on, very prompt. If people give me something to read, I give it back right away and that kind of thing.
Another really important mentor was Deborah Tannen, who I think basically got me that job at Georgetown. She’s very persuasive. The job at Georgetown was a two-year temporary job. I think if I had been a lot more obsequious than I was, something might have opened up, but maybe not. It was really just two sabbatical replacements in a row. But it was a really good stepping stone to my next job, at Texas A&M, which was a good job in many ways. It was the kind of job I’d been aiming for. Deborah taught me a lot about the nitty-gritty of getting published and editing and responding to other people’s work. She is very good at responding to other people’s work.
You mentioned a little bit about your own style when you mentor graduate students. Can you talk a little more about the kinds of things you try to impart as a mentor and what you think is important in that relationship?
I think being a good role model is one thing. Being a good model of a researcher and someone who is really active and publishing in refereed journals. I coauthor with graduate students a lot. This paper that I’m struggling with the framing of is with a graduate student. This is someone I probably will not work with on his PhD, and this paper is more linguisticky than anything he’s going to do as a rhetorician. But I want it to be useful to him, so I’m thinking about the kinds of work that he can do on this that will be useful to him in what he does. I’m going to model the rigorous, systematic work that I would like people to do. So part of it is just modeling the kinds of things you want. Not just “Do as I say” but also “Do as I do.”
The other thing is being reliable. That means a great deal to graduate students, responding to their work right away and responding to it in detail, with lots of comments. I do a lot of editing, helping them structure their work without getting too much in the way. Typically my students here come with an interest in something and it’s not something that I’m necessarily interested in. Usually it’s something that I haven’t even really thought much about, involving public discourse of some kind. I try to show them how really close, systematic, rigorous work can help them answer the questions that they have. So, it’s not about me; it’s not about what I do; it’s not about helping me with what I do. It’s about figuring out how the resources I have to offer can be applied to what they do.
One of the things that I’ve realized for myself is how heartbreaking it is to work with someone who doesn’t end up getting some kind of academic position when they really want one. I’m curious how you think of the relationship of working with someone as a student and your responsibilities to them once they’re not students any more.
I think about that a lot. I have said for a number of years, as I’ve seen the job prospects in rhetoric get tighter and tighter, that once students of mine were not getting jobs anymore, I was not going to take on any more students. So far I’ve been really lucky being at CMU and having all of my students who wanted academic jobs getting them. Not necessarily the best jobs in the country, but good jobs they ended up liking. One student who didn’t want an academic job has just been promoted to senior researcher at RAND Corporation, so he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. I’ve been lucky and it’s worked out so far, but it’s really important to me to make sure that if they want an academic job that they are being realistic about their chances.
It’s hard. For me that’s one of the hardest things about academia right now, not really having a sense of what kind of future there is. You never know what the future’s going to look like but it feels a little different now than it has in the past.
Yeah, it definitely feels different now. I think the big programs that just crank people out when most of them don’t get jobs are just irresponsible. It’s not just irresponsible, it’s immoral, I think.
It’s getting tougher and tougher. But, let’s close off with something more positive. What is something that you see as really exciting going on?
I actually have to say that some of the new ways of working with big data are exciting. It’s the last thing I ever thought I would say, and I don’t think I’m ever going to be one of those people. I think that it’s too early for there to be anything extremely interesting coming out of the kinds of projects that use massive computational power to find sociolinguistic patterns. At the moment they’re just looking at social media and basically finding things we already know. “Yes, there is regional variation,” for example. But I do think that some of the dialectology using large amounts of data and being able to see patterns of distribution of individual tokens of individual things over huge populations is pretty interesting.
Another thing that’s really interesting is how much easier it’s getting to do things like acoustic analysis. I mean it’s still hard and it’s still something you have to learn and futz with and keep working at but it’s certainly gotten a lot easier than when Labov started doing it back in the day.
The third thing is that linguistics is really popular now. Undergraduates like linguistics, and that has not always been the case. Something or some combination of things is making them able to see language in a way that most people in earlier generations couldn’t. Most people of my generation just took language totally for granted. But somehow kids are interested in language these days. Our linguistics major has reached its capacity in the sense that we can’t really handle any more students, but it could keep growing. There’s a lot more interest than there used to be.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.