The Conceptual Development of Language Ideologies
Silverstein's pioneering article, first presented in a Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels at the Chicago Linguistic Society, argued for the recognition of a more central, mediating role for linguistic ideology as an influential part, or ''level,'' of language. He argued that speakers' awareness of language and their rationalizations of its structure and use were often critical factors in shaping the evolution of a language's structure. In a later formulation of this position, he...
Power and Practice in Hierarchical Polynesia and Micronesia
Just as the languages of the Pacific Islands exhibit formidable diversity, the speakers of these languages also organize their social lives and cultural systems in widely divergent ways from one part of the Pacific to the other. Yet, in the midst of this remarkable diversity, recurring patterns emerge, and it is these patterns of familiarity and systematicity that sociocultural anthropologists have worried about since they began conducting fieldwork among Pacific Islanders. Contrasting with...
Practice
Practice is habitual social activity, the series of actions that make up our daily lives. The notion of practice or praxis emerges from Marxism, and while this influence is apparent in the frequent use of the concept to understand the political economy of everyday life, the term now has a wider range of use. For linguistic anthropologists, one of the most important practice theorists is Bourdieu, not only because he considers language a practice rather than merely an abstract system of rules,...
References
Adger, C. T. 1998 . Register Shifting and Dialect Resources in Instructional Discourse. In S. Hoyle and C. T. Adger eds. , Kids Talk Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood pp. 151-169 . Oxford Oxford University Press. Anderson, B. 1983 . Imagined Communities. London Verso. Bakhtin, M. 1981 . The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist ed. M. Holquist . Austin University of Texas Press. Berger, P., and Luckman, T. 1966 . The Social Construction of Reality....
Poetry
Giorgio Banti and Francesco Giannattasio After distinguishing poetic procedures from poetry in a strict sense, some formal features of poetically organized discourse POD are described, such as its links with music, metric typology, and aspects of poetic languages. Poetry proper is seen as a cultural choice by listeners or readers who regard a text as poetic. The authors discuss kinds of POD not regarded as poetry and intermediate forms with prose and plain discourse. The chapter closes with a...
Is codeswitching strategic
Another standard assertion now subject to revision is that codeswitching is an interactional ''strategy.'' I believe that contention over this question is rooted as much in different understandings of strategy as in different views of codeswitching. At issue is whether the term ''strategic'' presupposes and privileges a speaker's intentions, and if so, whether intention implies conscious control. I will try to show this by examining the thoughtful argument of just one principal critic of...
Reported speech
Suspicions of language in some religious traditions focus on the very same linguistic and pragmatic properties that other traditions may seek to exploit. To the extent that religious practices respond to or contribute to the perception of an ontological gap contrary to the assumptions of ordinary interaction, they may be prone to draw on the decentering and recentering possibilities of entextualization processes. For religions ''of the book,'' the very existence of a written scripture is often...
Identity and Its Critics in Linguistic Anthropology
The trend to focus on identity in linguistic anthropology is in part a response to similar intellectual developments elsewhere in anthropology, as well as in the social sciences and humanities more widely. At the center of this scholarly endeavor are some dimensions of identity that are currently the most contested and politicized race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Arising from struggles for equal rights for marked members of these categories, the study of identity has always been highly...
Intermediate genres
The various procedures that have been briefly surveyed in section 3 - a musical and quasi-musical formalization of speech, metrics, and a special grammar, lexicon, and style - are present in several kinds of oral or written discourse in most societies. They are not always found together and, as mentioned above, they often occur also in kinds of texts one would not characterize as poetry in its proper sense. It is thus useful to speak of poetically organized discourse POD , as a broader category...
REFERENCES Wpn
Ahearn, L. M. 1999 . Agency. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 12-15. Ahearn, L. M. 2001 . Language and Agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30 109-137. Austin, J. L. 1962 . How to Do Things with Words. Oxford Oxford University Press. Austin, J. L. 1975 . How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn. ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisa . Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Banti, G. 2001 . Meter. In A. Duranti ed. , Key Terms in Language and Culture pp. 150153 . Maiden, MA Blackwell. Bates, E., and...
A working definition of agency
I propose the following working definition of agency 1 Agency is here understood as the property of those entities i that have some degree of control over their own behavior, ii whose actions in the world affect other entities' and sometimes their own , and iii whose actions are the object of evaluation e.g. in terms of their responsibility for a given outcome . The three properties of agency included in 1 are obviously interconnected. For example, the first property of agency degree of control...
Conclusion Tet
To uncritically reproduce widespread perceptions that madness entails linguistically signaled disengagement from others contributes to the construction of madness that Foucault 1973 ascribed to modern forms of power. It cuts off the dialogue between madness and sanity. On the other hand, this chapter's first section presents ample evidence to problematize romanticizing views of madness as creativity. Madness is suffering. To the extent that it entails a failure of intersubjectivity, it is...
Madness Compromising the Linguistic Capacities of Human Beings
The ability to speak coherently enough to respond appropriately to, and help create, recognizable social contexts helps define our sense of full humanness. From primatologist Jane Goodall to linguist John Lyons 1982 , many have built concepts of humanness upon the capacity for linguistic interaction. Radical deviation from normal speech interaction can cause interlocutors to judge one not only insane but less than completely human. This section explores the link between madness and fundamental...
Conclusion Sbb
As a set of practices for building relevant social and cultural action talk does not stand alone. Instead, the act of speaking always emerges within complex contextual configurations that can encompass a range of quite diverse phenomena. These include structurally different kinds of actors using the semiotic resources provided by their bodies to construct a range of relevant displays about orientation toward others and the actions in progress, the larger activities that local events are...
Workingclass Country
In South-Central Texas, the art of singing ''country'' music is highly valued and carefully cultivated, as are critical and aesthetic discourses about singing Fox 1995 . Country singers are musical specialists, responsible - like all folk artists - to their local communities for a wide range of performance skills Bauman 1977 but they are especially respected for their mastery over and creative extensions of a canonical catalogue of vocal techniques. This case study focuses on several of those...
Introduction Fpm
At the heart of the relationship between language and social inequality is the idea that some expressions of language are valued more than others in a way that is associated with some people being more valued than others and some ideas expressed by people through language being more valued than others. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the range of ways that these connections are articulated in linguistic anthropology. Dell Hymes expressed this general view of language and social...
Reflexive Processes Static versus Dynamic Models
In a review of the early literature on registers Douglas Biber observes that ''most register studies have been atheoretical'' 1994 36 , tending to employ static taxo-nomic and descriptive schemes rather than principled definitions. Recent work has focused more on reflexive semiotic processes and institutions Silverstein 1996 Agha 1998, 2002 Irvine and Gal 2000 through which register distinctions are effectively maintained and transformed in social life. Let me now comment on the way in which...
Indexicality 1
Practice, as repetition, is instrumental to a second semiotic process associated with identity indexicality. Indexicality is the semiotic operation of juxtaposition, whereby one entity or event points to another. The basic insight, first developed by semiotician Charles Peirce, is that some signs, which he called indices, function via repeated and non-accidental cooccurrence smoke is an index of fire, clouds of rain. This process of extracting meaning from juxtaposed events or entities has been...
Conversation as a Cultural Activity
Conversation is a vital resource for anthropologists in their goal to understand societies from the local perspective, and yet the systematic study of conversation from an anthropological perspective is quite recent. Looking at conversation as an activity, this chapter examines its role in a wide range of social practices, including language socialization, the constitution of identity and the establishment of authority, and the discursive organization of experience that characterizes narratives...
Retrieving the speech community
The work of John Gumperz 1968, 1972a, b revived the concept of the speech community by considering it a social construct. Instead of focusing on the single language model he defined it as ''any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage '' 1972b 219 .12 Gumperz focused on interface communication and determined that the notion of consistent,...
Semiotic Range
My final remarks concern the semiotic range - the range of semiotic devices that exist as elements - of a register's repertoires. Linguists have long been interested in the linguistic signs that belong to a register's repertoires. Yet since registers involve cultural models of speech pragmatics e.g., that a particular speech repertoire is appropriate to a type of conduct such models are easily extended to accompanying non-linguistic signs. Hence a register's linguistic repertoires often...
Regions and Histories
The Pacific Islands conjure images of extremes and paradoxes. Consisting of a large number of small islands scattered over the largest ocean of the planet, the region presents some of the most extreme patterns of social, cultural, and linguistic diversity anywhere in the world. Diversity, for example, characterizes the range of kinship structures, political organizations, and economic practices found among Pacific Island societies. Cosmologies, ritual practices, and modes of thought all exhibit...
Tactics of Intersubjectivity
While the various semiotic actions described above are all undertaken for the sake of identity, they do not always perform the same sort of identity work. As an explanation for social action, then, identity is not an analytical primitive. Just as important as understanding how identities are formed is understanding why they are formed, the purpose for which particular semiotic processes are put to use. Yet there has been very little theorization of the various purposes for which such identity...
Pidgins and Creoles
In the 1960s, at about the same time that sociolinguistics was taking form, the field of pidgin and creole linguistics was beginning to take shape as scholars from North America, Europe, and the Caribbean came together to exchange data and ideas Holm 1988 42-6 . This was a momentous development, for these languages were generally held in low esteem even by their own speakers at worst they were regarded as mere ''gibberish,'' at best as ''corrupted'' or ''bastardized'' versions of the European...
Misunderstanding
After discussing the impossibility of complete intersubjectivity, the chapter moves on to review communicative practices through which a degree of intersubjective understanding is constituted. Two contrasting research perspectives on misunderstandings in inter-cultural and inter-gender communication are reviewed, one of which views misunderstandings as a cause of poor inter-group relations, the other as a result of pre-existing social conflicts. It is argued that misunderstandings are not so...
Conclusion Ndt
Misunderstandings, as a contingent outcome of any interaction, encourage us to analyze the practices that afford a degree of intersubjective understanding. In our subjectively constituted world, ''understanding'' is not a state in which minds share the same content, but is rather a dimension of coordinated social interaction itself. The turn-by-turn structure of everyday talk helps make this coordination possible, enabling us to display, confirm, and make problematic our incremental, ongoing...
Notes on Contributors
Asif Agha is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, Folklore and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Structural Form and Utterance Context in Lhasa Tibetan and a number of articles including ''Schema and Superposition in Spatial Deixis'' and ''Concept and Communication in Evolutionary Terms.'' Benjamin Bailey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Language, Race,...
Real Apaches dont diphthongize
Although singers on the San Carlos reservation love country music deeply, they never in my experience diphthongize or twang, except in joking imitations of white singers. Keep in mind the earlier discussion of the prominence of twang in country singing style. These Appalachian features of country singing are so prominent, and so identified with the musical style, that one of linguist Dennis Preston's respondents to his ''folk dialectology'' project circled the area around North Carolina,...
Pitkern Language I Love You
One of the more intriguing episodes of language contact, and surely one of the best-documented, begins in 1789 in the aftermath of the now legendary mutiny on the Bounty. Having put Captain William Bligh and those crewmen who had remained loyal to him into an open boat and cast them adrift, the twenty-five mutineers now faced another concern avoiding capture by the British navy. Their first destination was the Polynesian island of Tubai about 300 miles south of Tahiti , but they soon came into...
Gesture Typologies
Modern gesture theorists have been preoccupied with gestural classification, perhaps because ordinary usage conflates under unexamined pre-theoretical labels what seem to be analytically separable phenomena. Returning to the NSOED, the origin of the English word ''gesture'' is to be found in Latingerere 'bear, carry, carry on, perform' via medieval Latin gestura , and its earliest usage accordingly meant a ''manner of carrying the body carriage, deportment'' - a very broad notion which only...
The Vast Linguistic Diversity
Though the basic genetic relations among North American languages are now generally understood, the nature of the differences that distinguish the languages are still being discovered and appreciated. We know that the words of one language seldom correspond perfectly to those of another. In Mohawk, for example, an Iroquoian language now spoken in Quebec, Ontario, and New York State, the word otsihkwa' is translated variously as English 'fist', 'knot in a tree', 'doorknob', 'warclub', 'hockey...
Indexicality
Bakhtin's framework allows us to see that the social indexical value voicing of a linguistic form can change, but it does not so easily show us how such change is accomplished. How do we come to infuse or hear different voices in a given form The social indexicality that is mobilized in codeswitching is not simply a matter of brute statistical correspondence of linguistic and social forms. Rather, a relationship of association must be noticed and interpreted in order to signify. The processes...
Variation in Sign Languages
Contrary to popular belief, deaf sign languages are not universal. Different groups have their own distinctive ways of signing. This variation is a resource for communi cating a complex range of information within shifting interactional contexts. The authors discuss a number of approaches to the study of sign variation, including how sign languages vary according to nation, region, ethnicity, gender, Deaf cultural identity, and language contact.
Metapragmatic Stereotypes of Use
In order to find samples of a register the linguist requires a set of directions for locating instances of language use where tokens of the register occur and a criterion for differentiating these from other types of speech that occur in the same stretch of discourse. Here the linguist must turn to the competence of language users. Traditional discussions of registers have long relied on the assumption that language users make ''value judgments'' Halliday 1964 about language form, that they are...
Conclusion Power and Identity
Throughout this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate ways in which speech community represents the location of a group in society and its relationship to power. This relationship is important to understand how social actors move within and between their speech communities. Speech communities may be marginal and contested, some are part of dominant culture and others a part of practice that may encompass all of the above. I have introduced some of the involvedness inherent in each example of...
Entextualized Tropes
One sense in which registers are ideological constructs is that the range of effects that can be implemented through the contextualized use of a register is always much larger than the range of effects reported in explicit stereotypes of use. The reason is simple. When we speak of contextualized use we are no longer speaking of effects implemented by the register's tokens we are concerned rather with the effects of an array of cooccurring signs of which the register token is a fragment. This...
REFERENCES Dqt
Abu-Lughod, L. 1986 . Veiled Sentiments Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London University of California Press. Abu-Manga, A.-A. ed. 1985 . Baajankaro. A Fulani Epic from Sudan. Berlin Reimer. Andrzejewski, B. W., and Lewis, I. M. 1964 . Somali Poetry An Introduction. Oxford Oxford University Press. Babalola, S. A. 1966 . The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala. Oxford Oxford University Press. Banti, G., and Giannattasio, F. 1996 . Music and Metre in Somali Poetry....
Authentication and denaturalization
Authentication and denaturalization, the second pair of tactics, respectively concern the construction of a credible or genuine identity and the production of an identity that is literally incredible or non-genuine. We have chosen the term authentication in deliberate contrast with authenticity, another term that circulates widely in scholarly discourses of identity and its critique. Where authenticity has been tied to essentialism through the notion that some identities are more ''real'' than...
Madness as human linguistic gifts run amok
Using language in face-to-face interaction requires more than just deploying symbols arbitrary, invariant signs . It requires pragmatic or indexical competence - fitting speech to context, e.g. through appropriate use of deictics pronouns and demonstratives and politeness markers. Where would conversation be without deictics like ''you'' or I Talk works from a ''deictic origo'' or center to locate ''close'' and ''far,'' ''self'' and ''other,'' even while speakers exchange turns and move about...
Codeswitching as Systematic and Meaningful
Since the early 1970s, linguistic anthropologists have accepted the view that code-switching is systematic, skilled, and socially meaningful. This is something of a defensive stance, responding to earlier beliefs that the use of more than one linguistic variety in an exchange is neither grammatical nor meaningful, but rather is indicative of a speaker's incomplete control of the language s . Codeswitches were generally seen from that perspective as lapses of language ability, memory, effort, or...
Narrative Lesson Six Pursuit of a coherent logic of events and pursuit of
Narrative practice that veers in the direction of coherence Narrative Practice 1 is more likely to be dominated by one active primary teller, while narrative practice that involves open-ended probing Narrative Practice 2 generally involves the active participation of more than one teller who collaboratively author the narrative of personal experience. Narratives that lean in the direction of coherence lend themselves to performance and didactic modeling, while narratives that take the path of...
Language Socialization in Action Kaluli Sermons and the Production of New
The idea of entrenchment leads us to the final example that we will discuss, one that highlights the three main themes - change, desire, and the production of subjectivities - that we have been discussing throughout this chapter. Let us return to Bosavi, the home of the Kaluli. In the early 1970s, fundamentalist Christian missionaries from Australia established a mission station in Bosavi with the goal of converting this ''Stone Age'' population as quickly as possible Schieffelin 2002 . These...
Vocal Anthropology From the Music of Language to the Language of Song
Steven Feld, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels This chapter takes up the intellectual background to, and contemporary practice of research into the intertwining of language and music. It combines an overview of the key historical issues concerning language-music intersections, and three ethnographic case studies, one focusing on the linguistic mediation of musical and especially timbral discourse, and the others focusing on connections between the singing voice and place, class,...
Relationships between Sign Language Variation and dDeaf Identity
Research in the United States has explored the relationships between sign variation and the concepts of pathological deafness, represented by lower-case ''d'' in ''deaf,'' and sociocultural deafness, represented by upper-case ''D'' in ''Deaf.'' Pathological deafness refers to deafness resulting from a hearing loss. Sociocultural Deafness refers to cultural, social, and political claims based on an ethnically Deaf identity in opposition to both a pathological view of deafness and to a hearing...
Introduction Fmm
Language socialization is a theoretical and methodological paradigm concerned with the acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, or ways of being in the world.1 It was articulated and developed in the 1980s Ochs and Schieffelin 1984 Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a as a response to two significant absences in a the developmental psycholinguistic literature on language acquisition and b the anthropological literature on child socialization. In the first case - the literature on language...
Metacommunication and madness
Indexicality includes more complex contextual engagements than simply perceiving who is speaking and thus distinguishing I from ''you.'' It presupposes sociocul- tural perspective-taking, including awareness of what implicit rules and messages, indirect indexes, or veiled insults are relevant to the ''language game'' being played in a given context. Gaps between culturally preferred states such as approving of others and actual states such as disapproval lead to indirect insults, such as...
REFERENCES Ksd
Ahearn, L. 2001 . Language and Agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30 109-137. Anderson, B. 1983 . Imagined Communities. New York Verso. Austin, J. L. 1962 . How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press. Bailey, B. 2000 . The Language of Multiple Identities among Dominican Americans. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 2 190-223. Barrett, R. 1999 . Indexing Polyphonous Identity in the Speech of African American Drag Queens. In M. Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and L. Sutton...
Metacommunication in Ranis family
Rani is a young Bangladeshi woman with schizophrenia I talked with her and her family in 1992 Wilce 1998a, in press . In the following lines, Rani fails to answer my questions 1-2, 18-19 , then says something about direction and the house near which we her family and I spoke - which, to us as her interlocutors, bore no relation to the previous turns. Then, Rani's family and I felt the pragmatic disconnect worsen when she began to pun on dik-e, which can mean ''in some direction'' but also ''let...
Myth Sign language is universal
Many people unfamiliar with sign languages believe there is only one way of signing for all deaf people. This is a common misconception. Sign languages are not universal, and they are not universal for the same kinds of reasons that spoken languages are not universal. Geographical, national, political, and social boundaries can separate people by the sign languages they use. Sometimes the differences can be great, as in the differences between whole sign languages, for example, as between...
Special style
Beyond these aspects, poetic diction frequently involves an indirect or veiled style that adds to its supra-ordinary quality instead of using a direct and straightforward way of referring to an object or a concept, it is hinted at in a way that requires previous knowledge or some thinking, even to the point of not being easily understood by everybody. This is what the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea refer to when they say that poetic lines have ''insides'' and ''underneaths,'' according to Feld 1990...