Итог полностью

Form and the information it imparts condense and symbolize the entire structure of the social relation from which they derive their existence and their efficacy (the celebrated ‘illocutionary force'). What is called tact or adroitness consists in the art of taking account of the relative positions of the sender and the receiver in the hierarchy of different kinds of capital, and also of sex and age, and of the limits inscribed in this relation, ritually transgressing them, if need be, by means of euphcmization. The attenuation of the injunction, reduced to zero in ‘Here', ‘Come¹, or 'Come here’, is more marked in Tf you would be so good as to come this way’. The form used to neutralize ‘impoliteness* may be a simple interrogative (‘Will you come?’), or a doubly delicate negative question ('Won’t you come?’), which acknowledges the possibility of refusal. It may be a formula of insistence which pretends not to insist by declaring both the possibility of refusal and the value set on compliance, in which case it may take a colloquial form, appropriate between peers (‘Do me a favour and come’), a ‘stilted’ form (‘Would you be so kind as to come’), even an obsequious form (‘If you would do me the honour of coming'); or it may be a metalinguistic inquiry into the very legitimacy of the question (‘May I ask you to come?).

What our social sense detects in a form which is a kind of symbolic expression of all the sociologically pertinent features of the market situation is precisely that which oriented the production of the discourse, namely, the entire set of characteristics of the social relation obtaining between the interlocutors and the expressive capacities which the speaker was able to invest in the process of euphemization. The interdependence between linguistic forms and the structure of the social relation within and for which it is produced can be seen clearly, in French, in the oscillations between the forms of address, vous and fu, which sometimes occur when the objective structure of the relation between two speakers (e.g. disparity in age or social status) conflicts with the length and continuity of their

acquaintance, and therefore with the intimacy and familiarity of their interaction. It then seems as if they are feeling their way towards a readjustment of the mode of expression and of the social relation through spontaneous or calculated slips of the tongue and progressive lapses, which often culminate in a sort of linguistic contract designed to establish the new expressive order on an official basis: 'Let's use ru.’ But the subordination of the form of discourse to the form of the social relationship in which it is used is most strikingly apparent in situations of stylistic collision, when the speaker is confronted with a socially heterogeneous audience or simply with two interlocutors socially and culturally so far apart that the sociologically exclusive modes of expression called for, which are normally produced through more or less conscious adjustment in separate social spaces, cannot be produced simultaneously.

What guides linguistic production is not the degree of tension of the market or, more precisely, its degree of formality, defined in the abstract, for any speaker, but rather the relation between a degree of 'average' objective tension and a linguistic habitus itself characterized by a particular degree of sensitivity to the tension of the market; or, in other words, it is the anticipation of profits, which can scarcely be called a subjective anticipation since it is the product of the encounter between an objective circumstance, that is, the average probability of success, and an incorporated objectivity, that is, the disposition towards a more or less rigorous evaluation of that probability.²⁰ The practical anticipation of the potential rewards or penalties is a practical quasi-corporcal sense of the reality of the objective relation between a certain linguistic and social competence and a certain market, through which this relation is accomplished. It can range from the certainty of a positive sanction, which is the basis of certitudo sui, of self-assurance, to the certainty of a negative sanction, which induces surrender and silence, through all the intermediate forms of insecurity and timidity.

The Linguistic Habitus and Bodily Hexis

The definition of acceptability is found not in the situation but in the relationship between a market and a habitus, which itself is the product of the whole history of its relations with markets, The habitus is. indeed, linked to the market no less through its conditions of acquisition than through its conditions of use. We have not learned to speak simply by hearing a certain kind of speech spoken