Description: Linguists have become increasingly interested in examining how class culture is socially constructed and maintained through spoken language. Julie Lindquist's examination of the linguistic ethnography of a working-class bar in Chicago is an important and original contribution to the field. She examines how regular patrons argue about political issues in order to create a group identity centered around political ideology. She also shows how their political argumentsare actually a rhetorical genre, one which creates a delicate balance between group solidarity and individual identity, as well as a tenuous and ambivalent sense of class identity.

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