Extremely common eloquence: Constructing Scottish identity through narrative (review)

Twenty-five years in the making, this coherently organized and lucidly written book examines storytelling practices in five Scottish communities (Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow). The author’s overarching aims are threefold: to show how expressive and eloquent Scottish speakers can be (despite earlier work by Macaulay himself that may have suggested otherwise); to connect the speakers’ modes of language use—in particular, their narrative practices—with strategies for identity construction in the cultural context(s) of Scotland; and to demonstrate that eloquence, rhetorically effective language use, does not depend on education. Taking his cue from Elinor Ochs’s research on ways narrative is rooted in cultural systems of knowledge, ideologies, and values, M explores the link between language and identity by focusing on a corpus of narratives told by members of the five Scottish communities mentioned above.

Ch. 1, ‘The study of language’ (15–25), situates M’s own approach within the broader landscape of linguistic research, noting that the data set consists of ‘extended samples of talk-in-action, of which one of the richest sources lies in the stories that people tell about themselves and their lives’ (23). Ch. 2 concerns ‘The problems of transcription’ (27–36) and outlines how M seeks to steer a course between the Scylla of excessive coding and the Charybdis of insufficient detail. Ch. 3, ‘A small soap opera’ (37–47), uses a short sample narrative to explore what constitutes a story and to review frameworks that have been developed for narrative analysis. Ch. 4, ‘The uses of dialogue’ (49–62), examines the structures and functions of reported speech in the narratives under study; dialogue can be used to dramatize important events, parody others’ speech, or exemplify cultural values. Ch. 5 turns to ‘The significance of stories’ (63–83), suggesting how salient events (not just dangerous incidents or adventures) can form the backbone of effective stories, and how stories typically reveal as much about the teller as about the events he or she is recounting. Ch. 6, ‘Third person narratives’ (85–101), focuses on what narratologists term ‘heterodiegetic narratives’, that is, stories told by narrators who were not themselves participants in the events being narrated. Here M compares and contrasts the storytelling styles of two narrators who recount the ‘same’ events in different ways; eo ipso narrated worlds can be viewed as discursive constructions rather than bedrock realities of which a given story will be a more or less authentic copy.

Ch. 7, ‘A stylistic anomaly’ (103–27), after providing an overview of recent theories of style in language, focuses on a narrative whose polyphonic style involves a mixture of economy and elaborated forms, blending characteristics of spoken and written language. Ch. 8, ‘Family stories’ (129–52), examines storytelling practices in two families; one ‘family style’ involves rapport, that is, the cooperative co-construction of narrated situations and events, while the other involves confrontation, face-threatening questions and challenges, innuendo, irony, and the like. Here M’s account would have benefited from inclusion of Neal Norrick’s important research on collaborative storytelling in family settings. Ch. 9, ‘The Auld Scotch tongue’ (153–61), sifts through the author’s corpus for evidence of the speakers’ own attitudes toward their language varieties, while Ch. 10, ‘The culture of Jock Tamson’s bairns’ (163–216), explores how the narrative corpus reveals underlying community values, and points to the ideological backdrop of everyday life. Ch. 11, ‘The poetry of talk’ (217–44), catalogs the many rhetorical tropes used in the corpus (from homoioteleuton to epizeuxis to symploce).

The final chapter of the book, ‘Discover the people’ (245–55), examines the cultural traditionalism that may be responsible for the persistence of dialect forms characteristic of modern-day Scottish English. The book also features three appendices containing extended story transcriptions, a glossary of Scottish-English words, and a rich bibliography.