In this book I shall explore the diverse ways in which we use double-voicing within spoken interactions in our everyday social and professional lives. I shall propose that there are intricate relationships between the use of double-voicing in everyday talk at work, and the ways in which speakers are relatively positioned by power and gender within specific contexts. According to their ‘subject positioning’ (Davies and Harré 1990), individuals may or may not be able to draw upon double-voicing as a resource for linguistic expertise. The organiser above was actually a leading academic in the field of linguistics, and thus carried the status and authority to make jokes in collusion with her audience. I suggest that double-voicing can provide a rich understanding of the nuanced ways in which linguistic interactions are negotiated and identities are constructed within everyday settings in social and professional life.

For some linguists, the term ‘double-voicing’ may be unfamiliar, although it has a highly influential, if under-valued role in the history of Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. The term is associated with the work of the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), who coined the phrase ‘double-voiced discourse’ in relation to the study of drama and fiction, and in particular to the novels of Dostoevsky. However, Bakhtin (1984: 194) was also acutely aware of the applications of double-voiced discourse to ‘the ordinary speech of our everyday life’, and he frequently made comparisons between quotidian speech and the language of academic discourse. In the context of this book, ‘double-voicing’ means that when a person speaks, they have a heightened awareness of, and responsiveness to, the concerns and agendas of others, which is then reflected in the different ways in which they adjust their language in response to interlocutors. This responsiveness goes well beyond normal conversational interactivity, and usually contains a ‘power’ dimension in that double-voicing can be used as a strategy to resist threats from more powerful others, to silence someone else, or even, to give someone a voice. The use of double-voicing is closely implicated with the ways in which power relations are constructed between speakers according to the interplay of social categories such as gender, age, ethnicity, profession and status. A key focus of this book will be upon gender identities and relations, although as author, I will be self-reflexive about the interplay of multiple social categories that construct individual identities, as well as of the context-bound nature of all social interactions (Butler 1990).

The purpose of this book is to develop a better understanding of the significance of double-voicing within routine linguistic practices, which could be of broad interest to anyone who is interested in the way language works, as well as to scholars of Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. Double-voicing is a micro-linguistic set of practices that is mostly used unknowingly in interpersonal, public and institutional discourse yet can produce profound effects on people’s interactions and relationships. Despite its significance, double-voicing has not been fully appreciated as a wider sociolinguistic phenomenon, an issue which this book seeks to address. Double-voicing is both a unique linguistic construct and a valuable interpretative tool for scholars and practitioners to comprehend the ways in which speakers routinely engage with each other in many every day contexts. The book also aims to be of specific interest to scholars of Language and Gender, in that it explores the discursive interaction between power, gender and linguistic expertise in positioning speakers within a range of institutional settings.

The concept of double-voicing largely applies to spoken interactions on an interpersonal level, which will be the primary focus of this book. However, as I review in Chapter 2, double-voicing works on micro- and macro-levels of interaction within different modes and media. Double-voicing is not necessarily easy to identify in everyday language in the same way as the grammatical components of a sentence, such as a verb, noun, adverb or clause, can be. It is highly context-bound, mainly recognisable in contextual use, and thus, localised, ethnographic knowledge is often necessary. However, there are a range of linguistic features/resources that might commonly index (see p. 12) double-voicing such as the use of politeness, hedging strategies, humour, framing, meta-comment, qualification, impersonation of other voices and so on. Double-voicing might also be signified by paralanguage through the use of such features as intonation, pitch, volume, hesitation and pausing. In some contexts, double-voicing may appear similar to ‘being polite’, although double-voicing is not synonymous with politeness, which is just one of its many forms of linguistic expression. Double-voicing features may also appear similar to linguistic humour, or the linguistic enactment of authority. None of these practices are double-voicing per se, but they may be used as linguistic resources by a speaker in order to double-voice, or index double-voicing. It would be challenging, in my view, to establish objective criteria by which to identify the linguistic forms of double-voicing, although I am willing to be proved wrong on this! Consequently, it would be difficult to tag transcripts for double-voicing within large corpora without a complementary qualitative analysis and/or detailed knowledge of the local context, speakers involved and so on. I explain how these categories emerged inductively through the process of conducting a research study in Chapter 4. Furthermore, definitions of double-voicing explored in this book are subject to the limitation that the research I have conducted thus far concerns the English language only and is confined to western European contexts. Double-voicing may well be both language-specific and culture-specific. Until further research is carried out within diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, I make no claims about double-voicing as a universal or cross-cultural phenomenon.

The second type is corrective double-voicing where the speaker attempts to correct or repair an error, often their own. An example of this might be where a manager in the workplace apologises for unfair behaviour to their team by saying, ‘Sorry I lost my temper but I wanted you to see that ... . ’ This is similar to anticipatory double-voicing in that a speaker recognises that others might criticise them if they do not correct the error, so they self-repair in order to limit the damage to the relationship. Corrective double-voicing is linguistically marked by such strategies as apology, seeking agreement with interlocutors, meta-pragmatic comment and ‘role-breaking’ (stepping out of the interactional frame in order to comment on it).

The third type is mitigating double-voicing where speakers aim to reduce the social distance between themselves and their addressees in order to achieve more effective relationships while serving their own agenda. For example, once again from the workplace context, a manager might have pitched an unpopular proposal to their team and followed this up with the double-voiced comment, ‘Look, does anyone want to respond to that? I don’t want you to feel unhappy with this proposal. ’ Mitigating double-voicing overlaps with anticipatory discourse, but primarily seeks to connect with others on an affective or relational level. It is marked by the use of personal pronouns, inviting responses, hedging and qualification, self-deprecating comments, meta-pragmatic comment, and other aspects of relational, polite or small talk (Holmes and Stubbe 2003).

The fourth type is authoritative double-voicing, which is used to heighten impact and display personal power, especially if a speaker feels threatened. So, for example, in delivering bad news, a manager might say to their team, ‘I realise it is tough that you will all lose your bonuses this quarter, but you will just have to learn from this experience. ’ Authoritative double-voicing can be tricky to identify linguistically, and often depends on tone, but is marked by linguistic expressions of authority (Fairclough 1989) such as the use of meta-pragmatic or qualifying clauses (‘I realise it is tough ... ’), followed by a directive, or a deontic modal phrase (‘you’ll just have to ... ’).

Finally, dialogic double-voicing is where the speaker debates ideas with themselves as if they are both the speaker and the addressee. This type either explicitly assumes an overhearing but non-speaking addressee, or can provide an opening for other speakers to join the self-debate (Bell 1984). Dialogic double-voicing is used extensively by academics, for example, in the course of a lecture or in academic writing (e.g. Baynham 1999). This is not simply the act of debating two sides of an argument but rather the act of defending oneself against the anticipated criticisms of the audience, whether students, colleagues or journal reviewers. The perceived voice of the audience/reviewer is always ‘in the head of’ the speaker/writer and hence, the produced spoken or written discourse is reflexively double-voiced in response. An explicit example of this might be where an academic writer was to say, ‘These claims have been extensively debated in research literature, but while they have considerable merit in our view, they do not go far enough. ’ Dialogic double-voicing is marked by such linguistic strategies as comparison and contrast, meta-pragmatic comment, framing, qualification and referencing other authorities.

In order to illustrate the different types of double-voicing and how they interweave, I shall now provide examples of authentic double-voicing in everyday action. The examples in this chapter are from email messaging, a global medium of communication well known for bridging the conventions of both spoken and written discourse (e.g. Crystal 2003). I shall use extracts from emails I have received during my work as a university professor, which reveal some of the ways in which double-voicing is routinely enacted. These emails are exchanged within an institutional frame (Goffman 1974) of working relations between individuals of varying status and levels of authority (student to staff; senior to junior staff and so on). Double-voicing is one of the means by which (often unequal) academic relationships are routinely negotiated and sustained.