Sociolinguistic Artifacts

This article explores the linguistic features of a highly stylized register of English called 'International Art English'. Looking at a corpus of words taken from e-flux, an art publishing platform, Rule and Levine explore the history, vocabulary, and syntax of IAE. I think that this article not only showed the ways in which IAE was used to enforce the boundaries of the art world, but also showed how writers (speakers?) of IAE actively used it to construct a persona for themselves that drew upon stylistic features to reinforce relevant and desirable traits. They noted that IAE users used it to "signal the assimilation of a powerful kind of critical sensibility, one that was rigorous, politically conscious, probably university trained." This meshes well with the Eckert's belief that third-wave variationist papers focus on variation as the result of "lifelong projects of self-construction and differentiation." (Eckert 2012) by highly agentic speakers.