Abstract
In Vox Popular, Robin Queen surveys “the surprising life of language in the media” and introduces linguistics via popular media to university students. Vox Popular is at once a work of scholarship and a textbook, but it’s written with such finesse that, at times, one forgets that it’s either, and reading it is just reading a really interesting book about language and media. Queen points out that most linguistic treatment of the mass media draws on unscripted media, because most linguists assume that imagined media is less authentic, but she disagrees. Of course, scripted media present us with “a highly edited version of social and cultural life,” but “they are no more and no less ‘real’ than the unscripted media” (21).
Vox Popular explains how students can study language in media by formulating a research question, transcribing data, coding that data, and constructing a corpus. This makes it sound like a manual, which in some respects it is, but it’s so much more. The textbook mode may be more explicit than others, but Vox Popular is implicitly a book of grander intellectual significance. The point about language in scripted media as not only “real” but “just as real” as “real-life communication” is Roman Jakobsonian. Paraphrasing another Roman, the comic playwright Terence, who flourished in the second century BCE, Jakobson famously wrote, Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto, which he translated as “I am a linguist and hold nothing that has to do with language to be alien to me,” including scripted media, one assumes. What Jakobson saw in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Queen sees in Mad Men and Modern Family.
Queen explores language in the media in eight chapters. The opening chapter, “Language in a Mediated World,” considers why linguists should be interested in media language, and why Vox Popular is especially interested in scripted narrative media. Queen develops some surprising parallels between language and scripted media—for instance, both are subject to the same sorts of moralizing. Chapter 2, “Exploring Language and Language Variation,” explains the differences between languages and dialects, the components of a grammar (in the professional linguistic sense of that term), the systematic nature of language, and how variation behaves systematically within the language system.
The third chapter, “Studying Language Variation in the Media,” is an excellent guide to student research. This is the chapter most like a manual. After advising students on how to come up with a viable research question and then extract data, Queen discusses analytic orientation, transcription, and coding data, all three demonstrated through her own work on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. The consistency of this approach should be helpful to students, as should be the mentoring strategy: “Here’s the way I do it,” says the mentor. “Why don’t you try it this way?”
“The next step in the analysis,” Queen advises, “is bringing together your codes and transcripts in a form that makes them available for final analysis” (68), which brings the chapter to a section titled “Constructing a Corpus,” followed by proposals to analyze said corpus in distinctly quantitative or qualitative ways, or even, as another section has it, “Triangulating Your Evidence with Different Analytic Approaches.” The chapter sketches research protocols, but students who lack research experience, or basic linguistics, will require more than a sketch. For instance, the section on coding does not elaborate on the variety of available labeling schemes; the section on building a corpus provides a very short list of tools available to analyze and manipulate data; VARBRUL is explained only in a footnote; and the section on qualitative analysis essentially defines discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, without much elaboration. This is not to complain about Vox Popular, which can’t do everything, but to indicate just how far it goes and how much one must expect to supplement it, if using it as a course text.
As Queen rightly insists, “Language can vary in a surprising array of ways” (85). She outlines some of those ways in chapter 4, “Dimensions of Variation,” arranged as a series of variational scales, some concerning form and others context: “Non-Linguistic/Linguistic,” “Spoken/Written,” “Non-Standard/Standard,” “Informal/Formal,” “Unplanned/Planned,” “Local/Global,” and “Private/Public.” Language can be described on all of these dimensions at once, and “the specific benefit of thinking about [them] as scalar rather than categorical is that it allows each to be considered in relation to the others” (115), while respecting particular speech contexts of scripted media.
In chapter 5, “Making Language Variation Meaningful,” as well as subsequent chapters, Queen encourages readers not only to identify dimensions of variation in narrative mass media, but “to think about what language variation means and, even more specifically, how it comes to have those meanings” (119). After a short section on ideologies as cognitive schemas—“a kind of unsettling way to think about things because it makes it seem like life is not based on some specific reality” (131)—there is a symmetrically expansive section on language ideologies. The chapter concludes with a compelling discussion of “Ideology, Indexicality, and Power.”
In chapter 6, “Language Variation and Characterization,” Vox Popular takes a wonderful turn towards narratology and stylistics. Previous chapters proposed narrative media as a productive site for linguistic thinking and research, research manageable even for university students, but the book here considers how language contributes to the structure, function, and appeal of narrative media. It draws linguistics into textual experience and questions of aesthetics, and there are few sociolinguistic approaches to media language that go so far. Queen ably—if, of necessity, too briefly—introduces some of the most difficult questions in sociolinguistics as they bear on fictional character. Sections include “Realness and Authenticity” (with a special focus on indexical authenticity), “Identity and Identification” (with special emphasis on relational identity), “Norms and Types,” and “Social Personae.”
The penultimate chapter 7, “Language as Narrative Action,” begins with performativity and speech acts, noting that “Staged performance”—the sort of speech central to the whole book—is not “just” storytelling, but linguistically significant, because it “brings what Roman Jakobson … called the poetic function of language into sharp relief. In Jakobson’s formulation, the poetic function of language highlights the interrelationships of language form and function” (185). As I suggested at the outset, Jakobson waits in the wings of Queen’s narrative and, a consummate performer, enters on cue and makes his mark. Queen proceeds to consideration of language as a plot device, and then, in a brilliant section, “Switching as Action,” she proposes new ways of thinking about style- and code-switching—new ways of valuing them—by examining their role in narrative media. Unexpectedly in a linguistics book, she comes up with provocative readings of the television shows and films she turns to for examples, thus demonstrating the value of linguistics in literary interpretation. The chapter closes with an extensive treatment of “Taboo Language as Action.”
Before concluding, in the last section of the last chapter, aptly titled “The End,” Queen explains how narrative media connect to their presumed audiences. This happens somewhat predictably in sections about where the audience fits into the sociolinguistic equation, audience design (following Allan Bell) and audience expectations of genre, style, and relations between the two. Then follows a section on enregisterment and the ways in which narrative media participate in the construction of codes or varieties of speech, such that they can be distinguished from one another. The section on stylization and authenticity is less helpful—for such a complicated issue, it is too short, underexplained, and underexemplified. The penultimate section widens the book’s lens to take in the terms on which we interact with audiovisual media generally. This widening is structurally an adept and stylish gesture towards “The End.”
This review has been easy to write because Vox Popular is especially well-organized and signposts its topics effectively—I have freely borrowed the language of section headings in describing chapters above. Short section length and the frequent focusing it entails will appeal to students. And the book has other textbook features: a seven-page section is likely to include an extended passage of dialogue, an illustration, and a table or graph. Attention need not be sustained for long, and a mix of text, graphics, and interactive prompts communicates the message more effectively than text alone. Linguistic and other disciplinary terms are placed in italics throughout, and a list of these key terms appears at the very beginning of the book, along with notes on transcription conventions.
Boxes titled “Food for Thought” also break up the text throughout. Sometimes these help to reinforce knowledge of a certain linguistic feature as well as prompt readers to illustrate the point of a section on their own, from their own experience. One asks that readers judge historical change in rhoticity of southern American speech by watching both Gone with the Wind and a more recent film, like The Help. Others are more open-ended and prompt sociolinguistic thought experiments: “Can you think of examples of seemingly unplanned language use that might have in fact been highly planned?” (204), for instance, Queen suggests, in social media. Nearly every section of the book contains at least one “Food for Thought” box.
Because of its linguistics, Vox Popular might serve an upper-level course on sociolinguistics, discourse, or language in the media; because of its attention to media texts, it might serve a media studies course that proposed linguistics as an analytical framework. Explanations of key terms often sound as though they mean to reinforce what students should remember from earlier courses. It would be fun to offer a first-year seminar on language in media, and Vox Popular could be the book for that course, too, but an instructor would have to slow the book’s relatively brisk presentation. The book could lead a graduate student to productive research or even a dissertation, without any course structure. At that advanced level, the book will be even more valuable to non-linguists working with narrative media—it’s sophisticated but accessible. Queen doesn’t talk down to students but she doesn’t talk above readers, either.
Framed as a textbook, Vox Popular might seem less important than it is, less a work of forward-looking scholarship. It would be a mistake to underestimate it in this way. The “Food for Thought” boxes may have been written for students, but I found them intellectually stimulating, if not as challenging as students might. I suppose I might articulate all of those questions for myself in some set of hypothetical contexts, but it’s unlikely, and so my professional thinking about language and narrative media was much advanced by reading Queen’s book. Besides a textbook, it’s an account of the state of play in study of language and media; it calibrates and consolidates two decades’ work by various scholars. But it is also potentially a foundational text, especially in non-linguistic disciplines. When the media theorists talk about media convergence and brand communities, they describe a partly linguistic phenomenon, but the linguistic content is not explicit, and Vox Popular may inspire some of its readers to bring linguistics to bear more insistently on current media theory.
Few books manage to lay down the contours of a sub- and interdisciplinary field while leading research at all levels, as a scholarly and pedagogical text. Vox Popular manages it splendidly, with linguistic rigor, with passion for the media and the social material embedded in them, and with style.