Presidential Address: Literary Qualities in Sociolinguistic Narratives of Personal Experience

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to be giving this talk today; what a pleasure it has been to serve as ADS president for the past two years; and how grateful I am to be turning the gavel over to Dennis Preston (who is almost as old as I am). The cusp of the new millennium--however one calculates it--has been a time of considerable growth and development of the Society. Many people deserve credit for our new energy and swelling ranks, and I'd like to take time here to give credit to just a few: Connie Eble, the current editor of American Speech; Allan Metcalf, the long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the Society; Dennis Preston, the program chair for the past two years; Walt Wolfram, the penultimate immediate past president; and John Baugh, the antepenultimate immediate past president (I guess that makes me the ultimate immediate past president).

I would like also to begin by dedicating this talk--with a great deal of humility--to the memory of Fred Cassidy, who passed away in June of this past year at the age of 92; Fred was almost the last of what for me were the beloved Old Guard of the Society. My wish is that the current vigorous state of ADS will last at least as long as Fred Cassidy's exemplary career as a teacher and scholar and mentor and colleague, and that at the turn of the next century our descendants will still be carrying on in the same spirit.

In the spirit also somewhat of connecting the present with the past, I want to look today at some data that I collected over 27 years ago as part of a social dialect project in Wilmington, North Carolina. The passage that I am about to play for you (transcribed in the appendix) is one of those sections of a sociolinguistic interview that the researcher prizes most highly: a relatively spontaneous narrative in which the person being interviewed apparently forgets that she is talking to a stranger and participating in a research project. My interviewee--hereafter, Emma--will be heard recounting an event in her recent past as what appears to be a normal conversational utterance, bound by the same rules of phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse that she would have used in talking to a friend. ¹ Her speech follows the rules of what we as dialectologists know to be a rather old-fashioned, fairly aristocratic, white coastal United States Southern accent.

However, I'm not going to talk about the speaker's dialect today, even though this is the American Dialect Society annual luncheon presidential address. Lately, I have been returning to many of my old tapes to listen to the content of the interviewees' conversations. The speakers, after all, were themselves not concerned with dialectology. It was the substance that was important to them, even when they were bored with the conversations, or suspicious or mystified about the unnaturalness of it all. So my topic today is not a traditional one for dialectologists: my subject is the discourse itself. It is a tradition of the Society to publish every ten years a monograph entitled Needed Research in American English. It is my hope that this luncheon address will suggest to the editors of the next volume of Needed Research that we turn ourselves to issues of discourse as well as the more traditional areas.

Other sociolinguists have urged that we return to our tape-recorded sociolinguistic interviews and examine them from perspectives beyond dialectology--most particularly, as discourse structures which in themselves have sociolinguistic import (see, e.g., Labov 1972, 1982; Schiffrin 1994). A brief postprandial presentation is not the time to discuss the specific debts of my project to the theoretical and methodological frameworks of these others. This is not, however, to make the frivolous claim that my analysis is not framed by...