Accomplishing identity in participant-denoting discourse

Wortham, S. (2003). Accomplishing identity in participant-denoting discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 13, 1-22.

Individuals get socially identified as categories of identity get used repeatedly to characterize them. Speech that denotes participants, and that involves parallelism between descriptions of participants and the events that participants enact in the event of speaking, can be a powerful mechanism for accomplishing consistent social identification. This article describes how two different types of participant-denoting speech events—participant examples and autobiographical narratives—can involve such parallelism, in which speakers simultaneously represent and enact analogous social positions and thereby strengthen social identification.

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