Итог полностью

the market helps to determine the production of the discourse. This anticipation, which bears no resemblance to a conscious calculation, is an aspect of the linguistic habitus which, being the product of a prolonged and primordial relation to the laws of a certain market, tends to function as a practical sense of the acceptability and the probable value of one's own linguistic productions and those of others on different markets.¹⁵ It is this sense of acceptability, and not some form of rational calculation oriented towards the maximization of symbolic profits, w hich, by encouraging one to take account of the probable value of discourse during the process of production, determines corrections and all forms of self-censorship - the concessions one makes to a social world by accepting to make oneself acceptable in it.

Since linguistic signs are also goods destined to be given a price by powers capable of providing credit (varying according to the laws of the market on which they are placed), linguistic production is inevitably affected by the anticipation of market sanctions: all verbal expressions - whether words exchanged between friends, the bureaucratic discourse of an authorized spokesperson or the academic discourse of a scientific paper - are marked by their conditions of reception and owe some of their properties (even at a grammatical level) to the fact that, on the basis of a practical anticipation of the laws of the market concerned, their authors, most often unwittingly, and without expressly seeking to do so, try to maximize the symbolic profit they can obtain from practices which are, inseparably, oriented towards communication and exposed to evaluation.¹⁶ This means that the market fixes rhe price for a linguistic product, the nature, and therefore the objective value, of which the practical anticipation of this price helped to determine: and it means that the practical relation to the market (ease, timidity, tension, embarrassment, silence, etc.), which helps to establish the market sanction, thus provides an apparent justification for the sanction by which it is partly produced.

In the case of symbolic production, the constraint exercised by the market via the anticipation of possible profit naturally takes the form of an anticipated censorship, of a self-censorship which determines not only the manner of saying, that is. the choice of language - ‘code switching* in situations of bilingualism - or the ‘level* of language, but also what it will be possible or not possible to say.¹⁷

Everything happens as if. in each particular situation, the linguistic norm (the law of price formation) is imposed by the holder of the competence

which is closest to the legitimate competence, i.e. by the dominant speaker in the interaction, and in a way that is all the more rigorous when the exchange has a higher degree of formality (in public, in a formal setting, etc.). It is as if the effect of censorship which is exercised over the dominated speaker and the necessity for him to adopt the legitimate mode of expression (French in the case of a patois speaker), or to come close to it, is more powerfully experienced, all other things being equal, when the disparity between the different kinds of capital is greater -whereas this constraint disappears between holders of an equivalent symbolic and linguistic capital, for example between peasants. Situations of bilingualism enable one to observe quasi-experimentally how the language used varies according to the relation between the speakers (and their instruments of expression), analysed in terms of the structure of the distribution of specifically linguistic capital and of other kinds of capital. Thus, in a series of interactions observed in 1963 in a small Bearnais town, the same person (an elderly woman living in one of the neighbouring villages) first used a ‘patois-French' to a young woman shopkeeper in the town, who was originally from another, larger town in the Bearn (and who, being more of a ‘city-dweller’, might not understand Bearnais or could feign ignorance). The next moment, she spoke in Bearnais to a woman who lived in that town but who was originally from the villages and more or less of her own age; then she used a French that was strongly ‘corrected’ to a minor town official; and, finally, she spoke in Bearnais to a roadworker in the town, originally from the villages and about her age. It is clear that the interviewer, as an ‘educated’ city-dweller, will only encounter strongly corrected French or silence; and if he uses Bearnais himself, this may well ease the tension of the exchange, but, whatever his intentions, it cannot fail to function as a strategy of condescension likely to create a situation no less artificial than the initial relationship.