Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Following Thurlow's (2020b) understanding of “wordsmiths,” in this paper I document an underexplored and markedly high-end area of language work: political speechwriting. Drawing on Macgilchrist and Van Hout's (2011) text trajectory approach to ethnographic discourse analysis I engage with two primary areas of scholarship: metadiscourse and entextualization (see Silverstein and Urban 1996), both of which facilitate a deeper understanding of the role of “elite” linguistic labor in contemporary markets. Ultimately, I demonstrate the ways in which political speechwriters come to claim skill and value – not only based on the unique “production format” (Goffman 1981) of the profession, but also related to the wider sociopolitical context of their work.

This article discusses the multifaceted and shifting nature of “shame” (ha'amā) associated with Tahitian, one of the Indigenous languages of French Polynesia. Despite congregants at the Mā'ohi Protestant Church contesting the colonial degradation of Mā'ohi Indigeneity and promoting the spiritual significance of Indigenous languages, the idea of shame and awkwardness attached to speaking practices remains the largest psychological obstacle for language revitalization. This research establishes that while “language empowerment” attempts to reverse colonial stigma, the site of “shame” is shifting from its colonial associations to an age-based habit and, further, to the speakers' failure in owning it.

Linguistic anthropology has remained largely unaffected by debates about ontology in other subfields. In turn, the concept of language has been conspicuously absent from ontological debates. The past few years, however, have seen attempts at articulating the two, interrogating what language is from ethnographic perspectives and extending the analytic focus to ontologies of language or linguistic natures. This article discusses such efforts and compares them to previous critical engagements with the concept of language. Calling into question the ontological equivalence of language within and across cultures, communities, and regions, it explores understandings of what language is that go against the grain of existing theoretical models.

The study of pronominal address in European languages is enriched by a comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific registers of person deixis. In European speech communities, token-sourced interdiscursivity plays a crucial role in framing the meaning of honorific (V) and nonhonorific (T) pronouns; the pronouns exchanged between members of an interlocutor dyad in a given discursive event presuppose the use of those same pronouns in sequentially prior events of interaction between that dyad. The shift from V to T within a serially ordered speech chain of discursive events - sanctified in the interaction ritual of ‘dispensation’ - is the pivot of the system, emblematizing a mutual incorporation of alter into the relatively ‘intimate’ sphere of interpersonal relationality. Beyond Europe, T-V systems typically rely more heavily on type-sourced interdiscursivity. In these cases, use of T or V stereotypically indexes particular social categories of person or relationship. There are profound formal-functional convergences in honorific person deixis cross-linguistically, like the use of nonsingular number to index deference. Nevertheless, there are important differences too. The pragmatic structures characterizing honorific registers of person deixis are shown to co-vary in important ways with this distinction between token-sourced and type-sourced social meaningfulness of pronominal alternants.