Linguistic Anthropology

A companion to linguistic anthropology / edited by Alessandro Duranti. 2004. - 648 pages – (Blackwell companions to anthropology; ISBN 0-631-22352-5 скачать

Synopsis of Contents

Part I: Speech Communities, Contact, and Variation
1 Speech Community
Marcyliena Morgan
A critical examination of the notion of speech community is crucial for the discipline of
linguistic anthropology, a field devoted to the study of what speakers can and cannot do
with words in the context of their everyday life. This chapter starts from a sociopolitical
view of the speech community as a group that can define speakers’ identity, citizenship,
and belonging. Only through the integration of local knowledge and communicative
competence in discursive activities can members identify insiders from outsiders, those
passing as members, and those living in contact zones and borderlands.

2 Registers of Language
Asif Agha
This is the first comparative framework for the study of registers, defined as linguistic
repertoires stereotypically associated with particular social practices or persons who
engage in such practices. After outlining methods for their identification and study,
the author discusses several aspects of registers in social life: their institutional
dissemination in society; their tropic uses in interaction; their ideological character;
factors influencing the growth or decline of registers; and the extension of register
models from linguistic to non-linguistic signs. The chapter illustrates these phenomena
with examples from several languages and societies.

3 Language Contact and Contact Languages
Paul B. Garrett
Language contact gives rise to a wide variety of outcomes, including bilingualism,
codeswitching, pidginization, creolization, language shift, and language ‘‘death.’’
These diverse outcomes are contingent upon multiple intersecting factors, linguistic
as well as social, historical, demographic, politico-economic, and ideological. Language
contact must therefore be regarded as a socially situated, culturally mediated
phenomenon – one that gives rise to particular types of communicative practices and,
in some but not all cases, to distinct new codes and identities.

4 Codeswitching
Kathryn A. Woolard
Codeswitching is a speaker’s use of two or more language varieties in a single speech
event. In response to earlier views of codeswitching as unsystematic and indicative of
inadequate linguistic control, a view of such practice as skilled, systematic, and socially
meaningful has become established. Debates remain over how best to characterize
this systematicity, and competing approaches propose varying social motivations or
functions of codeswitching. These debates in turn bring researchers to question the
discreteness of codes and the role of strategy and intentionality in codeswitching
practices. This chapter responds critically to these newer questions and suggests that
they can best be resolved by placing the phenomenon of codeswitching within more
general theoretical frames and by drawing on generalizable constructs such as voicing
and indexicality.

5 Diversity, Hierarchy, and Modernity in Pacific Island Communities
Niko Besnier
The Pacific Islands are linguistically one of the most diverse regions of the world. This
diversity is directly linked to sociocultural dynamics at play in many communities in
the area, which attribute prestige to multilingualism and encourages linguistic differentiation
over time, despite the language attrition that has taken place in the twentieth
century. Linguistic anthropologists have found in Pacific Island societies fruitful
grounds for the investigation of the way in which language, social structures, and
cultural dynamics are interwined.

6 The Value of Linguistic Diversity: Viewing Other Worlds through North
American Indian Languages
Marianne Mithun
The birth of linguistic anthropology is linked to the gradual discovery by Europeans
of the profound differences among North American languages. For some, such
differences seem accidental, arbitrary, and inconsequential, while for others, they
reflect deep intellectual, cultural, and social differences. Samples of the nature of
the diversity are presented, then the communicative forces that create and refine them
are discussed, along with the cultural and social purposes they may serve.

7 Variation in Sign Languages
Barbara LeMaster and Leila Monaghan
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 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.

Part II: The Performing of Language
8 Conversation as a Cultural Activity
Elizabeth Keating and Maria Egbert
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 and institutional
talk.

9 Gesture
John B. Haviland
Gesture is a pervasive resource in human communication, sometimes complementing
speech, at other times substituting for it. And yet, gestures have often been studied
separately from languages. Breaking with this tradition, this chapter links gesture to
the expressive inflections of language, showing that gestures exhibit the formal
properties of other linguistic signs, participating in communicative action, and
engendering cultural ideologies involving standards of behavior and theories of
language and mind.

10 Participation
Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin
Helped by the use of new audio-visual technologies, researchers studying the details
of face-to-face interaction have felt the need to develop new frameworks for the
understanding of how meaning is communicated across speakers and contexts. The
notion of participation has replaced conversation and the speaker–hearer dyad of
earlier research. This chapter starts from a critical examination of Erving Goffman’s
influential notion of ‘‘footing’’ to provide a comprehensive framework for the notion
of participation that includes not only the speaker and her talk, but also the forms of
embodiment and social organization through which multiple parties build action
together while both attending to, and helping to construct, relevant action and
context.

11 Literacy Practices across Learning Contexts
Patricia Baquedano-Lo´pez
In its broadest sense, literacy refers to the competent use of knowledge and interpretive
skills in culturally defined activities. This chapter provides a brief theoretical
overview of the study of literacy and emphasizes the importance of investigating
literacy development in its cultural and historical context, that is, as
practices that are contingent on the moment, but which also encode a historical
trajectory. The chapter also includes illustrative examples of the role of language in
literacy practices and development across learning contexts, both in and out of
schools.

12 Narrative Lessons
Elinor Ochs
Narratives imbue unexpected life events with a sense of temporal and causal orderliness.
They bring the remembered past into present and projected possible realities,
enhancing continuity of selves in the world. In construing life events, competent
narrators alternatively construct a coherent logic of experience or probe the authenticity
of narrated experience. These two narrative practices vary in scope of (co-)
tellership, tellability of recounted events, embeddedness in surrounding discourse,
linearity, and moral certainty.

13 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 discussion of how and when poetry proper is
produced and circulated.

14 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, ethnicity, agency, difference, and social identity.

Part III: Achieving Subjectivities and Intersubjectivities through
Language
15 Language Socialization
Don Kulick and Bambi B. Schieffelin
Since its inception as a methodological and theoretical paradigm in the 1980s,
language socialization has been applied to a variety of contexts and cultures. In this
chapter the authors examine its potential for understanding not only culturally
predictable outcomes, but also culturally elusive subjectivities. By looking closely at
the relationship between language and the socialization of desire and fear, they show
how the study of language socialization can be extended into domains that have
traditionally appeared problematic or unapproachable for anthropologists and linguists.

16 Language and Identity
Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall
In the last few decades, identity has become a key notion within the social sciences,
anthropology included. This chapter offers one model of identity as the outcome of
semiotic processes, especially language. Readers are first introduced to four wellresearched
processes of how identity is formed (practice, indexicality, ideology, and
performance). Then the discussion turns to less explored and yet fundamental issues
regarding the sorts of identity relations that are formed through these semiotic
processes: sameness/difference, authenticity/inauthenticity, and authority/delegitimacy.

17 Misunderstanding
Benjamin Bailey
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 much
about decoding utterances, but about negotiating sociocultural worlds.

18 Language and Madness
James M. Wilce
Madness includes linguistic (particularly pragmatic) deviance. Two troubling stances
are found in popular and scholarly discourse: (1) blaming the mad for breakdowns in
interactions central to human experience dehumanizes them; (2) treating diagnostic
labels and institutional interactions as forms of psychiatric power constitutive of
madness overly politicizes madness. A synthesis is proposed: if madness problematizes
interaction yet reflects social environments as much as neurons, linguistic anthropologists
can offer new ways to analyze speech environments that help or exacerbate
madness.

19 Language and Religion
Webb Keane
‘‘Religious language’’ refers here to ways of using language that seem to the users
themselves to be linguistically unusual and to involve non-ordinary kinds of action or
identity. Often these marked forms of language occur when language users face some
kind of presumed ontological difference. Religious practices commonly involve manipulations,
often strong and highly self-conscious, of ubiquitous formal and pragmatic
features of language. They can therefore provide analysts with comparative
insights into local intuitions and ideologies about relations among linguistic form,
discursive practices, and different modes of agency.

Part IV: The Power in Language
20 Agency in Language
Alessandro Duranti
Agency is a recurrent theme in contemporary social theory and yet it is difficult to
find a precise definition of it. This chapter breaks with this tradition by providing a
working definition of agency that becomes the basis for a distinction between two
dimensions of agency in language: performance and encoding. Close attention to the
performance of language suggests that even before constituting specific speech acts,
the use of language affirms the speaker as a potential agent. From a cross-linguistic
comparison of the encoding of agency, we learn that all historical-natural languages
(1) have ways of representing agency, (2) display a variety of grammatical devices for
doing it, and (3) have strategies for agency mitigation.

21 Language and Social Inequality
Susan U. Philips
In every society and social context, some forms of talk and the speakers associated
with them are valued more than others. This relative valuing of language forms plays a
major role in the constitution of social inequalities. This chapter analyzes how
linguistic anthropologists have examined such inequalities in bureaucratic settings,
in gender relations, in political economic relations, and in European colonial encounters.

22 Language Ideologies
Paul V. Kroskrity
Launching from a definition of language ideologies which combines criteria regarding
speakers’ awareness of their linguistic and discursive resources and their politicaleconomic
position in socioeconomic systems, the chapter provides a brief historical
account of why this theoretical movement occurs relatively late in twentieth-century
linguistic anthropology. This provides relevant background for understanding current
research which exemplifies five important features of language ideologies including
awareness, multiplicity, and involvement in identity construction.

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ALESSANDRO DURANTI. Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics) - Cambridge University Press; First Edition edition - 420 pages скачать

CONTENTS
Preface page xv
Acknowledgments xix
1 The scope of linguistic anthropology 1
1.1 Definitions 2
1.2 The study of linguistic practices 5
1.3 Linguistic anthropology and other disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences 10
1.3.1 Linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics 13
1.4 Theoretical concerns in contemporary linguistic anthropology 14
1.4.1 Performance 14
1.4.2 Indexicality 17
1.4.3 Participation 20
1.5 Conclusions 21

2 Theories of culture 23
2.1 Culture as distinct from nature 24
2..2 Culture as knowledge 27
2.2.1 Culture as socially distributed knowledge 30
2.3 Culture as communication 33
2.3.1 Lévi-Strauss and the semiotic approach 33
2.3.2 Clifford Geertz and the interpretive approach 36
2.3.3 The indexicality approach and metapragmatics 37
2.3.4 Metaphors as folk theories of the world 38
2.4 Culture as a system of mediation 39
2.5 Culture as a system of practices 43
2.6 Culture as a system of participation 46
2.7 Predicting and interpreting 47
2.8 Conclusions 49

3 Linguistic diversity 51
3.1 Language in culture: the Boasian tradition 52
3.1.1 Franz Boas and the use of native languages 52
3.1.2 Sapir and the search for languages’ internal logic 56
3.1.3 Benjamin LeeWhorf, worldviews, and cryptotypes 57
3.2 Linguistic relativity 60
3.2.1 Language as objectification of the world: from von Humboldt
to Cassirer 62
3.2.2 Language as a guide to the world: metaphors 64
3.2.3 Color terms and linguistic relativity 65
3.2.4 Language and science 67
3.3 Language, languages, and linguistic varieties 69
3.4 Linguistic repertoire 71
3.5 Speech communities, heteroglossia, and language ideologies 72
3.5.1 Speech community: from idealization to heteroglossia 72
3.5.2 Multilingual speech communities 76
3.5.3 Definitions of speech community 79
3.6 Conclusions 83

4 Ethnographic methods 84
4.1 Ethnography 84
4.1.1 What is an ethnography? 85
4.1.1.1 Studying people in communities 88
4.1.2 Ethnographers as cultural mediators 91
4.1.3 How comprehensive should an ethnography be?
Complementarity and collaboration in ethnographic research 95
4.2 Two kinds of field linguistics 98
4.3 Participant-observation 99
4.4 Interviews 102
4.4.1 The cultural ecology of interviews 103
4.4.2 Different kinds of interviews 106
4.5 Identifying and using the local language(s) 110
4.6 Writing interaction 113
4.6.1 Taking notes while recording 115
4.7 Electronic recording 116
4.7.1 Does the presence of the camera affect the interaction? 117
4.8 Goals and ethics of fieldwork 119
4.9 Conclusions 121

5 Transcription: from writing to digitized images 122
5.1 Writing 123
5.2 The word as a unit of analysis 126
5.2.1 The word as a unit of analysis in anthropological research 129
5.2.2 The word in historical linguistics 130
5.3 Beyond words 132
5.4 Standards of acceptability 134
5.5 Transcription formats and conventions 137
5.6 Visual representations other than writing 144
5.6.1 Representations of gestures 145
5.6.2 Representations of spatial organization and
participants’ visual access 150
5.6.3 Integrating texts, drawings, and images 151
5.7 Translation 154
5.8 Non-native speakers as researchers 160
5.9 Summary 161

6 Meaning in linguistic forms 162
6.1 The formal method in linguistic analysis 162
6.2 Meaning as relations among signs 164
6.3 Some basic properties of linguistic sounds 166
6.3.1 The phoneme 168
6.3.2 Etic and emic in anthropology 172
6.4 Relationships of contiguity: from phonemes to morphemes 174
6.5 From morphology to the framing of events 178
6.5.1 Deep cases and hierarchies of features 181
6.5.2 Framing events through verbal morphology 188
6.5.3 The topicality hierarchy 191
6.5.4 Sentence types and the preferred argument structure 192
6.5.5 Transitivity in grammar and discourse 193
6.6 The acquisition of grammar in language socialization studies 197
6.7 Metalinguistic awareness: from denotational meaning to
pragmatics 199
6.7.1 The pragmatic meaning of pronouns 202
6.8 From symbols to indexes 204
6.8.1 Iconicity in languages 205
6.8.2 Indexes, shifters, and deictic terms 207
6.8.2.1 Indexical meaning and the linguistic construction of gender 209
6.8.2.2 Contextualization cues 211
6.9 Conclusions 213

7 Speaking as social action 214
7.1 Malinowski: language as action 215
7.2 Philosophical approaches to language as action 218
7.2.1 From Austin to Searle: speech acts as units of analysis 219
7.2.1.1 Indirect speech acts 226
7.3 Speech act theory and linguistic anthropology 227
7.3.1 Truth 229
7.3.2 Intentions 231
7.3.3 Local theory of person 233
7.4 Language games as units of analysis 236
7.5 Conclusions 243

8 Conversational exchanges 245
8.1 The sequential nature of conversational units 247
8.1.1 Adjacency pairs 250
8.2 The notion of preference 259
8.2.1 Repairs and corrections 261
8.2.2 The avoidance of psychological explanation 263
8.3 Conversation analysis and the “context” issue 264
8.3.1 The autonomous claim 267
8.3.2 The issue of relevance 271
8.4 The meaning of talk 275
8.5 Conclusions 277

9 Units of participation 280
9.1 The notion of activity in Vygotskian psychology 281
9.2 Speech events: from functions of speech to social units 284
9.2.1 Ethnographic studies of speech events 290
9.3 Participation 294
9.3.1 Participant structure 294
9.3.2 Participation frameworks 295
9.3.3 Participant frameworks 307
9.4 Authorship, intentionality, and the joint construction
of interpretation 314
9.5 Participation in time and space:
human bodies in the built environment 321
9.6 Conclusions 328

10 Conclusions 331
10.1 Language as the human condition 331
10.2 To have a language 332
10.3 Public and private language 334
10.4 Language in culture 336
10.5 Language in society 337
10.6 What kind of language? 338

Appendix: Practical tips on recording interaction 340
References 348
Name index 387
Subject index 393