This study examines Hip Hop styling, gender, and sexual agency in a sex education class. The focus is on the indirect indexing of gender by a female-bodied student through the Hip Hop cultural personas of braggadocio and swagger, providing a rare look at ‘mundane’ performances of Hip Hop and its relationship to gender. Discourse analysis demonstrates that she used Hip Hop styling to manage ascriptions of sexual agency during a discussion task as she repeatedly recontextualized the telling of a classroom incident. Her language use afforded the trying out of identity meanings and required complex discursive work in relation to constructs such as masculinity, femininity, straight, and lesbian. These processes assisted her to negotiate how sexual agency might fit with her various identifications and identities. Therefore the potential for Hip Hop styling to connect identities with language has implications for both sexuality education and the study of sociolinguistics. (Agency, gender, Hip Hop, performativity, sexuality, social identities, styling)*

Social meaning-based approaches to linguistic variation treat variation as a semiotic system, in which sociolinguistic signs—indexical links between linguistic forms and social meanings—serve as interactional resources that individuals use to project personae. This article explores the perceptual nature of the links between social personae and linguistic forms, examining how information about a speaker's persona can influence a listener's linguistic perceptions of a continuous phonetic feature. Using a phoneme categorization task, this study examines associations between gradient phonetic manifestations on a continuum from /æ/ to /ɑ/ and three social personae. Findings illustrate that the social persona made relevant for a listener influences the ways in which points on this phonetic continuum are categorized phonemically as either trap or lot. Overall, this shows that the social constructs of personae influence phonetically detailed perceptions of linguistic material. (Sociolinguistic perception, personae, indexicality, sociophonetics, sociolinguistic signs)*

Mock white girl (MWG) performances parody a linguistic and embodied style associated with contemporary middle class white girls in the United States. The article identifies bundles of semiotic resources in the stylization of the white girl persona—for example, creaky voice, uptalk, blondeness, and Starbucks—in three genres of MWG: Savior, Shit white girls say, and Teenage girl problems. While semiotic variables used to index the white girl persona are consistent across performances, there is significant variation in performers’ ideological stances relative to the mocked figure of personhood: white girls in the US are not ‘heard’ in any one way by all social actors. Contextualizing MWG performances through analysis of stance reveals critical variation in how the white girl is interpreted, evaluated, and produced as a meaningful social entity by diverse segments of the population. (Gender, mock, race, parody, persona, stance, style)*

Despite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)*

An investigation into the interactive features of small group, child-led storytelling in preschool classrooms serving lower socioeconomic status (SES), multilingual children shows both the affordances and constraints of positioning children to author their own experiences in the classroom. In story circles, children told stories that included canonical instantiations of story and culturally shaped features. Through their stories, the children advanced ideas, built connections, and evaluated ways of telling stories as they continued ideas like threads from story to story. Child-led storytelling did not disrupt the dynamics of power through which some ways of using language are privileged while others are marginalized. Instead, story circles simply shifted children’ relationship to the process of being and becoming literate such that children did the evaluating, valuing, and promoting of ways of using language, developing literate identities, but potentially forestalling some ways of participating even as shared interactional norms were developed. (Storytelling, multicultural, early childhood education)*