The practical cognition and recognition of the immanent laws of a market and the sanctions through which they are manifested determine the strategic modifications of discourse, whether they concern the effort to ‘correct’ a devalued pronunciation in the presence of representatives of the legitimate pronunciation and, more generally, all the corrections which tend to valorize the linguistic product by a more intense mobilization of the available resources, or, conversely, the tendency to resort to a less complex syntax, to the short phrases which social psychologists have observed in adults when they address children. Discourses are always to some extent euphemisms inspired by the concern to ‘speak well’, to ‘speak properly’, to produce the products that respond to the demands of a certain market; they are compromise formations resulting from a transaction between the expressive interest (what is to be said) and the censorship inherent in
particular relations of linguistic production (whether it is the structure of linguistic interaction or the structure of a specialized field), a censorship which is imposed on a speaker or writer endowed with a certain social competence, that is, a more or less significant symbolic power over these relations of symbolic power.18
Variations in the form of discourse, and more precisely the degree to which it is controlled, monitored and refined in form (formal), thus depend, on the one hand, on the objective tension of the market, that is, on the degree of formality of the situation and, in the case of an interaction, on the extent of the social distance (in the structure of the distribution of linguistic and other kinds of capital) between the sender and the receiver, or the respective groups to which they belong; and, on the other hand, on the ‘sensitivity' of the speaker to this tension and the censorship it implies, as well as the closely related aptitude to respond to a high degree of tension with an expression which is highly controlled, and therefore strongly euphemized. In other words, the form and the content of a discourse depend on the relation between a habitus (which is itself the product of sanctions on a market with a given level of tension), and a market defined by a level of tension which is more or less heightened, hence by the severity of the sanctions it inflicts on those who pay insufficient attention to ‘correctness’ and to ‘the imposition of form' which formal usage presupposes.
It is, therefore, not clear how one could understand, other than in terms of variations in the tension of the market, the stylistic variations of which Bally gives a good example.19 with a series of expressions (represented here by approximate English equivalents) which are seemingly interchangeable, since they are all oriented towards the same practical result: ‘Come!’, ‘Do come!’, ‘Wouldn’t you like to come?’, ‘You will come, won't you?’, ‘Do say you’ll come’, ‘Suppose you came?’. ‘You ought to come’, ‘Come here’, ‘Here!’ - to which could be added ‘Will you come?’. ‘You will come’, ‘Kindly come’. ‘Would you be so good as to come’, ‘Be a sport, do come’. ‘Come please!’, ‘Come, I beg you’, ‘I hope you will come’, ‘I’m counting on you , . .’ and so on ad infinitum. Although such expressions are theoretically equivalent, they are not so in practice. Each of them, when used appropriately, achieves the optimum form of the compromise between the expressive intention - in this case, insistence, which runs the risk of appearing as unreasonable intrusion or unacceptable pressure - and the censorship inherent in a more or less asymmetrical social relationship, by making maximum use of the available resources, whether they are already objectified
and codified, like expressions of politeness, or remain in a virtual state. This is as much insistence as one can ‘allow oneself* to exert, so long as the ‘forms’ are observed. Where ‘If you would do me the honour of coming' is appropriate, ‘You ought to come’ would be out of place, because too off-hand, and ‘Will you come?’ would be distinctly ‘crude’. In social formalism, as in magical formalism, there is only one formula in each case which ‘works’. And the whole labour of politeness strives to get as close as possible to the perfect formula that would be immediately self-evident if one had a perfect mastery of the market situation.
