Tier Structures Are the Symbolic Contribution to Inequality: The Register–Genre Nexus in Contemporary Greater North America

Abstract

Abstract The enregisterment of social classes within a division of labor organized by social relations of dominance, on the one hand, and with specific languages, on the other hand, results in tiered or ranked sociolinguistic structures characteristic of our planetary society. These sociolinguistic tiers are produced from the nexus of register and genre, such that enregistered codes like English become conventionally indexically associated with genres of command, while other languages become associated with subservience, for example. The metapragmatically regimenting register/genre nexus is, of course, indexically backed by a wide range of relatively congruent nonlinguistic tiered factors, like gender, race, and access to weapons. This article develops a semiotic view of political economy, inequality, and power, theorizing how symbolism differentially contributes to the tiering of all other semiotic kinds of signals in and through verbally mediated conative social coordination.