on the markets with the greatest tension, like the academic market or the high-society market, increases as one rises in the social order, i.e. with the increased frequency of the social occasions (from childhood on) when one finds oneself subject to these demands, and therefore able to acquire practically the means to satisfy them. Thus bourgeois usage is characterized, according to Lakoff, by the use of what he calls hedges, e.g. ‘sort of, ‘pretty much’, ‘rather’, ‘strictly speaking’, ‘loosely speaking’, ‘technically’, ‘regular’, 'par excellence', etc., and, according to Labov, by intensive use of what he calls filler phrases, e.g. ‘such a thing as’, ‘some things like that’, ‘particularly’.25 It is not enough to say, as Labov does (with a view to rehabilitating popular speech, which leads him simply to invert the system of values), that these expressions are responsible for the verbosity and verbal inflation of bourgeois speech. Though superfluous in terms of a strict economy of communication, they fulfil an important function in determining the value of a way of communicating. Not only does their very redundancy bear witness to the extent of the available resources and the disinterested relation to those resources which is therefore possible, but they are also elements of a practical metalanguage and, as such, they function as marks of the neutralizing distance which is one of the characteristics of the bourgeois relation to language and to the social world. Having the effect, as Lakoff puts it, of ‘heightening intermediate values and toning down extreme values’, or, as Labov says, of ‘avoiding all error and exaggeration’, these expressions are an affirmation of the speaker’s capacity to keep his distance from his own utterances, and therefore his own interests - and, by the same token, from those who cannot keep such a distance but let themselves be carried away by their own words, surrendering without restraint or censorship to their expressive impulse. Such a mode of expression, which is produced by and for markets requiring ‘axiological neutrality’ (and not only in language use), is also adjusted in advance to markets which require that other form of neutralization and distancing of reality (and distancing of the other classes which are immersed in it) which compromises the stylization of life: that forming of practices which gives priority in all things to manner, style and form, to the detriment of function. It is also suited to all formal markets and to social rituals where the need to impose form and to observe formalities, which defines the appropriate form of language - i.e. formal language - is absolutely imperative and prevails to the detriment of the communicative function, which can disappear as long as the performative logic of symbolic domination operates.
It is no coincidence that bourgeois distinction invests the same intention in its relation to language as it invests in its relation to the body. The sense of acceptability which orients linguistic practices is inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions: it is the whole body which responds by its posture, but also by its inner reactions or, more specifically, the articulatory ones, to the tension of the market. Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed. There is every reason to think that, through the mediation of what Pierre Guiraud calls ‘articulatory style’, the bodily hexis characteristic of a social class determines the system of phonological features which characterizes a class pronunciation. The most frequent articulatory position is an element in an overall way of using the mouth (in talking but also in eating, drinking, laughing, etc.) and therefore a component of the bodily hexis, which implies a systematic informing of the whole phonological aspect of speech. This ‘articulatory style’, a life-style ‘made flesh’, like the whole bodily hexis, welds phonological features - which are often studied in isolation, each one (the phoneme ‘r’, for example) being compared with its equivalent in other class pronunciations - into an indivisible totality which must be treated as such.
