Metapragmatics

The paper uses Hungarian data to explore the phenomenon of interclausal contextualizing relations, analysing clauses which provide access to a prominent referential scene via the speaker's mental operations. Seriality (closely related to the directing of attention) is treated as a point of departure, and it is argued that grammatical schemas for construing clause complexes offer patterns for serial construal as well. At the same time, linear realization is fundamentally affected by what opportunities are available for directing attention in the current discourse space, in the ongoing organization of discourse. These two factors collectively shape clause order within clause complexes. Clauses are regarded as intonation units integrated into clause complexes whose structure is defined by the build-up of attentional frames mutually elaborating each other as successive strata. The system thus outlined serves as a basis for exploring contextualizing clauses in Hungarian. Special attention is devoted to clauses (participating in subordinating interclausal relations) which foreground the speaker's mental operations and effect a grounding predication.

Keywords: clause complexes, grounding predication, baseline-elaboration, attentional frames, seriality, metapragmatic awareness

If your library has access to Springer Link a full version of this book can be downloaded via: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-40703-6 . 

This book focuses on the discursive processes that allow activists to make sense of themselves and of the modes of politics they engage in. It shows how political and metadiscursive awareness develop in tandem with a reconfiguration of one’s sense of self. The author offers an integrated pragmatic and poststructuralist perspective on self and subjectivity. He draws on Essex style discourse theory, early pragmatist philosophy, and linguistic pragmatics, arguing for a notion of discourse as a multi-dimensional practice of articulation. Demonstrating the analytical power of this perspective, he puts his approach to work in an analysis of activist discourse on integration and minority issues in Flanders, Belgium. Subjects articulate a whole range of norms, values, identities and narratives to each other when they engage in political discourse. This book offers a way to analyse the logics that structure political awareness and the associated boundaries for discursive self-interpretation.

'At a time in which notions of both politics and activism are being profoundly reshaped, Zienkowski's incisive analysis goes to the heart of what may drive such changes. Empirically delicate and theoretically astute, this is discourse analysis at its best.' - Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

'This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the discursive logics that shape self and society, as well as how to study them. It combines discourse theory and pragmatic perspectives on interaction, generating an innovative interpretive and functional heuristic for doing poststructuralist discourse analysis. As an added bonus, it provides a creative and critical contribution to discussions on the workings of ideological fantasy. Highly recommended!' - Jason Glynos, Reader, University of Essex, UK

'If you ever wondered what the world looks like through the eyes of well-informed and politically active members of disadvantaged minorities, you must read "Articulations of self and politics in activist discourse". As a discourse analysis with a truly multidisciplinary orientation, Jan Zienkowski offers unrivaled insights which, based on research in a Belgian context, have unfortunately gained relevance through recent dramatic events.' - Jef Verschueren, Professor, University of Antwerp, Belgium

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk – a Scandinavian local language – unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically ‘pre-shift,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘old’ or, in some other way, temporally authenticated register, it intercalates an analysis of linguistic exchanges with histories of production of authoritative discourse. Through a stepwise analysis of the production of metapragmatic discourse, it explores the indexically presupposing and entailing relationship between artefactual objectivation and novel registers of language. Thus examining the enregistering interpretation of genred regimentations of language-as-form, it argues that such focus is apt for creating a reflexive and less essentializing understanding of linguistic authenticity.

Keywords: authenticity; indexicality; enregisterment; metapragmatics; descriptivism; engagement

This study considers uses of the word mansplain as a phenomenon of gendered metapragmatics, or metalinguistic commentary related to male-female communicative dynamics. Mansplain (a portmanteau of man and explain), a neologism recently popularized on social media, is typically used by women to describe men speaking to women in a patronizing manner. However, the analysis of social media discourse reveals a wider range of meanings and uses, as users employ the word to critique, evaluate and/or normalize the appropriateness of other users’ language. From a dataset of 200 Twitter and Facebook posts, the study analyzes patterns of the word’s functions, showing how uses of mansplain not only expose varying beliefs about how men and women should or should not talk to each other, but also communicate affective and epistemic stances about the value of discussing other people’s language use more generally. Some reactions to the prevalence of the word are observable in various usages of mansplain, demonstrating both acceptance and rejection of gender-specific metalanguage. For example, some use the term deliberately to exhibit metapragmatic self-monitoring (e.g., “Not trying to mansplain but…”). However, others who reject the legitimacy of the term consider it to be a linguistic weapon used to unduly silence men’s voices. I argue that online comments using the word mansplain illuminate multiple sociocultural issues such as: how women, by labeling their verbal repression, are empowered to defy it through metapragmatics; how users retaliate against a gendered term; and how a word can be re-contextualized and re-appropriated transforming its meaning to reflect multiple viewpoints.

"RESUMEN
Este trabajo pretende contribuir a delimitar la recomendación como acto de habla, dado que la existencia de términos como consejo, advertencia, aviso o indicación, en alternancia con el término recomendación, sugiere que los hablantes de español perciben diferencias entre los actos de habla que cada término describe. Para ello, cabe acceder a la conciencia metapragmática de los hablantes; en particular, a su conocimiento sobre los actos de habla, que, según propuestas cognitivistas, los hablantes recogen en forma de Modelo Cognitivo Idealizado (MCI) ilocutivo. La información contenida en cuatro diccionarios actuales del español ofrece una vía de acceso a esta conciencia metapragmática. El análisis lexicográfico permite diferenciar parcialmente los MCI de estos distintos actos de habla, así como establecer sus relaciones.

Palabras clave: pragmática, léxico metapragmático, actos de habla directivos.

ABSTRACT
This study attempts to delimit recommendation as a speech act. The existence in Spanish of terms such as consejo (‘advice’), advertencia (‘warning’) or indicación (‘indication’), alternating with the word recomendación (‘recommendation’), suggests that speakers of Spanish perceive differences between the speech acts described by each term. To delimit recommendation, we need to access the speakers’ metapragmatic awareness, specifically, their knowledge of speech acts, represented, as many cognitive linguists propose, as an illocutionary idealized cognitive model (ICM). The lexicographical information in four current Spanish dictionaries allows this access to the metapragmatic awareness. The results of the lexicographical analysis allow us to distinguish partially the ICMs of these different speech acts and establish their relations.

Keywords: Pragmatics, metapragmatic vocabulary, directive speech acts."

This article describes and analyzes the form and function of the term 'nosebleed' as it is used by speakers in the contemporary Philippine linguistic scene. 'Nosebleed' operates as a metapragmatic, semiotic stance marking device used to bracket various kinds language/s in relation to concepts of high sociocultural value in the archipelago: local concepts of the commensurability of language-and person-types, and culturally-enregistered joking styles that mitigate hiya, or 'shame' in interaction. This analysis draws from popular discourses to outline the ideological foundations of the term and goes on to examine its social and linguistic effects to theorize the ways that homegrown metapragmatic tools such as 'nosebleed' can shape varieties of language over time.

The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, " language " functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as an autonomous object, entangling it with other semiotic modalities and thereby displacing it beyond its putative borders.

This is how the goals of this book are described in the Preface:
This study seeks to define language ideologies having first reached a definition of ideologies in general; that is, it proceeds from the general to the specific.
A comprehensive review of the literature on language and ideology is also provided, which allows the advanced student to move at their own pace through various theories and research tools and choose the ones that better suit their own research interests.
The book is structured around two fundamental principles. .
The first principle, “Barthes’ principle”, determines the semiotic nature of ideologies in general. According to it, ideologies are second-degree semiotic systems, which do not signify directly but only through language (or through other first-degree semiotic codes). They do not signify; they connote or implicate, or under- or over-signify. Implicature and presupposition are ideologies’ favorite modes of signification.
The second principle, “Silverstein’s principle”, defines in a very general way a very specific application of the first. Language ideologies, just like all ideologies, are second-degree semiotic systems (Barthes’ principle); in addition, they also are or they are also capable of becoming metalinguistic systems (Silverstein’s principle), i.e. semiotic codes whose universe of discourse is defined by first-degree semiotic systems, i.e. by languages.
The book is structured after those two principles. The second chapter, which could be read first, presents Barthes’ principle, some of its corollaries as well as some reasonable restrictions on it.
The third chapter presents Silverstein’s principle as a further condition on Barthes’ principle.  Language ideologies are defined as second-degree metalinguistic systems. The notion of metalanguage is explained at length. It is argued that, language ideologies, as second-degree metalinguistic semiotic systems, are ideologies par excellence. Although language ideologies are but a subcategory of ideologies in general, their analysis can now be used to shed light on ideologies in general.
The first chapter provides the necessary historical prolegomena to the next two chapters. It could be read independently of the other two.  It explains how the study itself weighs itself against two imposing and competing paradigms in the theory of ideology. The first: the original, descriptive, synthetic paradigm developed by the French idéologues, who first introduced the notion of idéologie; and the second one: the critical and analytical paradigm prevailing today, a paradigm established simultaneously with the deconstruction (or partial destruction) of the concept of ‘ideology’. The starting point for this second paradigm is, to my opinion, the critique by Marx and Engels of The German Ideology.
The study of these two “first moments” in the genesis of ‘ideology’ reveals how the concept of ‘ideology’ changed in parallel with the critique to it, a critique aiming simultaneously at specific ideologies and earlier theories of ideology. The subject of criticism became its object. We can no longer settle with a descriptive agenda. We do not believe in a General Science of Ideas, a General Idealogy capable of describing and classifying every idea and every ideology. Destutt de Tracy and his followers failed. But neither could we today adopt a critical attitude, pretending ideological neutrality and scientific objectivity - as if there were a science of ideology in which our critical force is founded. What is needed, I argue, is a synthesis of the two paradigms, which does not preclude a critical attitude towards ideologies, while at the same time providing detailed and inductive descriptions of them. The book’s approach is conceptual and explanatory; it draws from linguistics – and, more particularly, from sociolinguistics and metapragmatics.
The historical study of the early stages in the theory of ideologies is also revealing of how intellectuals working from within these two different paradigms perceived the relationship between language and ideology. In both paradigms we find the notion of ‘language’ to overlap with the notion of ‘ideas’ (concepts, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs). This partial identification, which, depending on one's interest, might be called either linguistic or conceptual relativism, can be attributed to the inability of both theoretical paradigms to distinguish between first-degree and second-degree semiosis, on the one hand, and between language and metalanguage, on the other. The absence of this double distinction is manifested in a paradoxical symptom: linguistic or conceptual relativism is invoked in the critique of ideology/ies, while, as documented in the third chapter, relativism is in fact one of the most important mechanisms of the ideology/ies thus critiqued. Particularly in the field of language ideologies, relativism, it is argued, is the finite mechanism that generates ideologies, while, at the same time, the ideologies thus generated become indistinguishable from the description or the critique to which they are subjected. Relativism is a metalinguistic principle, not a linguistic one. The ideologies it generates are language ideologies.
The three chapters of the book follow, therefore, the three steps in an argument. The first chapter defines the historical context in which the study is placed. The second defines the broad area defined by Barthes’ principle. And the third concentrates on the unexplored territory of language ideologies.
The book’s argument is largely explanatory. In the literature one comes across several definitions of “language ideologies”. The definitions reflect an author’s own interests and they are often incompatible with each other. The following distinctions are introduced, distinctions which define different (although interdependent) areas of research:
A) the language of ideology/ies;
B) language ideologies - linguistic ideologies;
C) ideologies-in-language.

A) The study of the language (or the “languages”) of ideology/ies is concerned with issues pertaining to the functioning of ideologies as semiotic (or “symbolic”) systems. The most important issues in this category are:
1) the analysis of ideologies as second-degree semiotic systems;
2) implicature as a tool for understanding second-degree semiosis;
3) the formation of ideological stereotypes;
4) the use of presuppositions and metaphors in forming stereotypes;
5) the normative and performative character of ideologies.

B) On the other hand, language ideologies are implicitly (Barthes’ principle) or explicitly (Silverstein’s principle) about language.  The study of language ideologies includes all those issues which are openly debated within a linguistic community, issues which have become stereotypical, which have left their imprint on the collective consciousness (such as the Greek Language Question). One of the most salient language-ideological issues is standardization. Standardization is but the guiding of linguistic behavior by ideas (standards). But this is also the definition of language ideologies: the positing of a linguistic variety according to a metalinguistic model, which usually results in the attempt to make the linguistic variety “conform” to the pattern through which it is perceived. Language ideologies always exist when there is metalinguistic consciousness – and the aim of standardization is to increase metalinguistic consciousness at a collective level. Language ideologies are also distinguished from linguistic ideologies (i.e., ideologies within linguistics); not only are language and linguistic ideologies part of “divergent larger systems of discourse and enterprise” (M. Silverstein), their semiotic mechanisms are also different.

C) Finally, ideologies-in-language are more often than not confused with language ideologies. Ideologies-in-language have to do with differentiation. In this third category belong all the issues relating to perceived variation. It is shown that the correlation of linguistic variables with independent ones is not necessarily mediated by language ideologies; on the contrary, the correlation is more often than not mediated by non-linguistic ideologies (such as ideologies of prestige, of social class, of gender, etc.). These non-linguistic ideologies may also have linguistic manifestations (as ideologies-in-language), although it is not necessary that they develop to full-blown language ideologies. In fact, it can be proven (with semiotic arguments) that Barthes’ and Silverstein’s principles are incompatible for the same set of semiotic units; their incompatibility necessitates a semiotic mediation through non-linguistic ideologies for both principles to apply.
The theory of language ideologies developed in this book is exemplified by a comprehensive presentation of the development of Standard Modern Greek. Reference is also made to other languages and language ideologies.

Il saggio si rivolge a chiunque voglia esplorare un campo di ricerca affascinante e tuttora poco noto in Italia: la (s)cortesia storica. Preceduto da un’introduzione teorica, in cui si presentano le innovazioni più recenti nei campi della pragmatica storica e della pragmatica della (s)cortesia, lo studio si impernia su una trasformazione chiave, vale a dire la progressiva erosione del cerimoniale di antico regime e la nascita della cortesia contemporanea nell'Ottocento, che viene esaminata sia dall'ottica prescrittiva dei trattati comportamentali, sia attraverso rappresentazioni fittizie della prassi (s)cortese storica. Si seguono le tracce di questa trasformazione in tre generi letterari “orali” – il dialogo teorico, il teatro e il romanzo – di autori (Castiglione, Bibbiena, Ariosto, Goldoni, Manzoni e Collodi) che usano gli scambi dialogici fittizi o per contestare le norme vigenti o per promuoverne delle alternative.

Metapragmatics encompasses the study of displays of awareness on the part of users and observers of language about their use of language. In this chapter, it is argued that corpus-based approaches to metapragmatics are uniquely positioned to advance such studies, as it allows for interpretive (horizontal) and statistical (vertical) methods of analysis to be successively applied to the analysis of metapragmatic data. The different ways in which corpora have been used to study metapragmatic labels with respect to the broader metacommunicative lexicon of which they form a part are discussed, alongside studies of metapragmatics in use, that is, the use of these metapragmatic labels in situated contexts. It is then argued, building on a case study illustrating how claims of non-serious intent (e.g. just kidding, only joking) can be studied from a corpus-based perspective, that studies in corpus-based metapragmatics necessarily involve carefully interweaving horizontal and vertical methods of analysis. The chapter concludes with a call for further corpus-based metapragmatic studies across different languages.

This paper analyses white nationalists women's language as a form of metapolitical seduction. Using submissive speech (Hall 1998), these Tradwives narrate their conversion to the far right. Drawing on Inoue's work on the fetishization of women's voice (2004), this paper analyzes these conversions as metapragmatic narratives of appropriate femininity and inappropriate feminism, designed to both seduce men and to restore them to their proper place above women. By performing feminine tradition, Tradwives both communicate white nostalgia and allow men to take the helm of a masculine modernity. This sexuality has metapolitical effects, contributing to the white nationalists project of resurrecting white masculinity and regendering the political world. While many researchers focus on white supremacist men, and mens speech, more analysis is needed of women's work. Close analysis of this language shows the social and semiotic work women do to elevate white men, revealing more of their role in nationalist movements and mechanisms by which white supremacy is made not only normal but desirable.

This article explores the ways in which Tamil film stars, so-called mass heroes such as the " Superstar " Rajinikanth, are presenced in theatrical events of their onscreen revelation and apperception. Drawing on film analysis, ethnographic accounts of theatrical reception , and metadiscourse by filmgoers and industry personnel, I focus on Rajini's onscreen pointing gestures in highly charged moments of presencing. As I argue, these data provoke reflection on indexicality—defined by Charles Sanders Peirce as a semiotic ground based on " real connection " or " existential relation, " such as copresence, contigu-ity, or causality—for at issue with Rajini's fingers is precisely the question of his auratic being and presence. Instead of analyzing performative acts of presencing through appeal to the analytic of indexicality, then, what if we interrogate those ethnographic particular-ities of existence and presence that constitute the ground for indexical relations and effects as such? Such an inquiry would refuse to leave indexicality as a self-evident, pregiven analytic, but instead pose it as an open ethnographic question. Opening up the question of existence and presence, as I show, allows us to unearth other semiotic " grounds " of indexicality and representation beyond those that we all too often take for granted.

Este artigo tem por objetivo refletir sobre a relação entre as ideologias linguísticas e a instituição  de  hierarquias  raciais  na  Modernidade,  focando  especificamente  em  suas  formas linguísticas  comumente  usadas  no  Brasil.Para  isso,  pressuponho  que  certas  formas  de  falar
sobre a linguagem em geral e a língua portuguesa no Brasil em articular modelam os sujeitos racializados  que  somos  na  atual  configuração  do  sistema  mundo  moderno/colonial.  As ideologias  linguísticas  modernas  e  suas  conexões  com  a  constituição  e  manutenção  das
hierarquias raciais são discutidas em três formas principais, todas rarefeitas por mecanismos de racionalização.  As  formas  discutidas  são  1)  a  ideologia  da  homogeneidade  variável,  uma regulamentação  da  fala,  cuja  conexão  com  hierarquias  raciais  é  rarefeita  pelas categorias “classe” e “região”; 2) a ideologia da clareza, uma regulamentação de gêneros discursivos, cuja conexão com hierarquias raciais é rarefeita pelas categorias “razão” e “argumentação”; e 3) a ideologia  da  competência,  uma  regulamentação  da  legitimidade  dos  saberes  e  corpos,  cuja conexão  com  hierarquias  raciais  é  rarefeita  pelas  categorias  “educação”  e  “cultura”.  Após  a discussão dessas ideologias, concluo que os mecanismos metapragmáticos que as constituem e fazem funcionar podem ser as condições contraditórias de seu enfretamento.

Theories of meaning rely on foundational questions that address the nature of meaning in natural language and the relations linguistic structures bear to human conceptual structures and to the world. Metasemantics, also dubbed 'foundational semantics' or 'the metaphysics of meaning', addresses such foundational questions. Analogously, the term 'metapragmatics' (on its relevant understanding), stands for the metaphysics of communication and a 'theory about pragmatic theories'. The chapter addresses various understandings and goals of metasemantics and metapragmatics, their interrelation, as well as their place vis-à-vis descriptive semantics and pragmatics and their methods on the one hand, and philosophy of language on the other. The structure is as follows. Section 1 provides an introduction to a metatheoretic inquiry. In Section 2 I address the goals and scope of metasemantics and assess its role in determining the power of semantic theories and principles on which they are based, and also its controversial role in determining what counts as semantic facts. Having briefly addressed the distinction between metasemantics and metalinguistic meanings in descriptive semantics, the levels of metasemantic analysis, and the question of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, I move in Section 3 to addressing the goals and scope of metapragmatics, attending to its different facets and defending the main sense of the term as the metaphysics of communication. I discuss there the distinction between metapragmatics as the 'theory about pragmatic theories' and the rather distinct use of the term 'metapragmatics' as the study of metacommunicative devices in discourse. Analogous to Section 2, I address the question of levels of metapragmatic analysis. To conclude, in Section 4, I summarise the discussion, make some informed predictions about the future of the pertinent labels, and also briefly discuss the relation between metasemantics and metapragmatics on the one hand and philosophy of language on the other, pointing out that methods in semantics and pragmatics are always dependent on the answers to foundational questions settled by the first two; they are not merely chosen to fit the descriptive questions. As a result, experimental pragmatics for example is never in competition with philosophy of language (and philosophical semantics and pragmatics) but acts as one of several possible executors of their research programs. 1. Metatheoretic inquiries: An overview Meta-level discussions can concern different basic-level objects: the 'meta-' prefix (Greek for 'after', 'behind', 'among', 'higher', 'beyond', 'above', 'transcending', 'with') combines comfortably not only in the well-acknowledged 'metaphysics', but in our times with metamathematics, metahistory, metaethics, metalanguage, metacommunication, metasemiotics, metapragmatics, metasemantics, metasyntax, metaknowledge, metaculture, metadata, metacognition, metaexistence, and so forth, enjoying formidable productivity. The compounds display somewhat less consistent compositionality in that the meta-level,

This discussion note is inspired by, and in turn expands on, a few themes and threads laid out in Judith Bridges’s “Explaining ‘-splain’ in digital discourse”. The note stresses the focus and contribution linguistic anthropologists have made to understanding various types of indexical meaning-making practices, and the order of indexicality. This discussion note also briefly details the affordances of the word “explain” and the suffix “x-plain”, which may account for why this suffix, and not others, has come to be used so frequently.

In recent years, the intersections between, or entanglements of, local action and translocal patterns gained renewed interest in sociolinguistics. Received distinctions such as micro/macro or practice/structure have been chal- lenged and confronted with more granular concepts such as sociolinguistic scales. Consequently, established disciplinary orientations such as micro/macro or qualitative/quantitative sociolinguistics have also been questioned: rather than one of two options, sociolinguistics is now supposed to embrace “complexity”. This fundamental discussion also centrally concerns research into language ideologies. While it has always been acknowledged that language ideologies frame and shape, or manifest in, local action, they have long been construed as a translocal social order, a “macro phenomenon”. In the wake of the general discussion outlined above, however, this has been challenged. Language ideologies are now increasingly located at the intersection of structure and practice, construed as structurating practices and as dynamic, scalar phenomena that emerge from, and are subjected to, ongoing local processes of social positioning and indexical enregisterment (which they reversely frame). This special issue takes up the discussion and asks where we can get to with such a complex notion of language ideologies and/as social positioning, how far we have come already, and which obstacles lie ahead. The authors address these questions from different perspectives. This introduction sets the scene, recapitulates the discussion and state of the art, and provides an outline of the issue.

Current studies on language and citizenship view citizenship not just as a fixed political category but as a product of continuous negotiation that can be mediated by various sociolinguistic means. This study contributes to the ongoing academic conversations on language and citizenship by examining how the notion of citizenship is discursively constructed in Singapore, and its relationship with how new citizens imagine and position themselves in Singapore society with respect to the material conditions that surround them.

By using an interpretive approach that incorporates methods from linguistic ethnography, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, this study analyzes a dataset comprising public media texts (newspaper articles and government-produced documents about citizenship from 2013-2017) and interview narratives and observational data from 18 new citizens. The focus on new citizens, which has been lacking in sociolinguistic research, was motivated by the importance of their position in Singapore society: while they have completed the citizenship application process, they continue to grapple with citizenship-based issues in their everyday lives.

This study analyzes how various signs, such as linguistic patterns, metapragmatic comments, and multimodal resources, come to index citizenship. The study proposes that these signs cluster together and become typified into the field of indexicality (Jaffe, 2016) of citizenship. The study argues that citizenship functions as a metasign—a sign “…that regiments how it itself and other signs are to be interpreted” (Gal, 2016: 114). Viewing citizenship as a metasign paves the way for the analysis of how various signs are regimented and construct the notion of citizenship and for the investigation of how people position themselves in relation to citizenship. The findings reveal that Singapore public media texts primarily revolve around the legal and political aspects of citizenship that tend to reflect governmental discourses on citizenship, while the interview narratives highlight the socially situated, experiential, and affective aspects. My participants’ articulations of citizenship—which were intertwined with their accounts of emotions and lived experiences—facilitate how my informants employ or reconfigure indexicalities about citizenship. The participants used the signs of family and mobility to present themselves as new citizens who negotiate the global and the local —a dichotomy that undergirds policies and discourses on Singapore citizenship. Moreover, their narratives about how they manage difference enable them to present themselves as new citizens who are good citizens in their own way. This shows that my participants’ reconfigurations of statal narratives into something that matches how they view themselves allow them to claim status as legitimate and good citizens of Singapore. The findings show that the new citizens’ perspective can help us understand how dominant discourses on citizenship are circulated and reproduced in Singapore society.

In this article, I argue for chronotopic and scalar approaches to the analysis of language use in general and multilingual practices in particular. Drawing on data from Iranian Azerbaijanis, I argue that availability and accessibility of linguistic/semiotic resources, and their categorizations as languages or language varieties, are constrained by participants’ chronotopization histories. That is, the scaled images participants develop through socialization about different time-space frames and the peoples, relations, discourses, and resources therein guide their language use both from and about particular contexts. I discuss the utility of spatiotemporal understandings of repertoires of resources and normalcies in capturing the variability, dynamicity, and complexity of semiotic practices and also in addressing the controversies among scholars regarding the ‘realness’ of languages and hybridity of multilingual practices. Through decentralizing language(s) and foregrounding context(s) and contextualization, I argue, the chronotope enables us to analyze not only social actors’ hybrid utilization of semiotic resources in meaning-making processes, but also their language ideologies and language-ideological practices, which rely heavily on the perceptions of ‘languages’ as discrete systems.

As a contribution to what I call a linguistic anthropology of cinema, this article explores the question of deixis in linguistic and cinematic semiosis, detailing some of the semiotic functions and processes common to both. In particular, I focus on what Michael Silverstein has discussed as metapragmatic calibration types and the ways they intersect and play off of each other in South Indian fictional film. Drawing on an analysis of the poetics of a particular scene in the 1997 commercial Tamil film, Arunachalam, the narration of its uptake by one of the film's actresses, and my own ethnographic work on the Tamil cinema, I show how the multiple, simultaneous calibrations of deixis in the scene work to performative effect. While film semiotics has long taken linguistic models to think about filmic form (viz. "film language"), this analysis suggests the way in which an ethnographic analysis of cinematic discourse, on and off the screen, contributes to a more encompassing linguistic anthropological analysis of linguistic and cinematic semiosis.

The Istanbul Greek (IG) community is an indigenous minority group totaling ~2000 members. Due to their specific geopolitical and sociohistorical context, the IG dialect has unique contact-induced linguistic features from Turkish, French, and other languages, in addition to archaisms and innovations. Because the IG community encompasses multilingual individuals who are ethnically Greek but nationally Turkish, they provide a unique opportunity to observe how identity is represented and circulated with language.

This dissertation presents an ethnographic and variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the IG community and their speech. Six months of ethnographic observation over 2016 and 2018 resulted in interviews with over 80 IG speakers of various demographic backgrounds. Sociolinguistic interviews elicited a range of dialectal variants from a range of task types. I acoustically measured phonetic features of IG that differ from Standard Modern Greek (SMG) from wordlist data and ran mixed-effects models along conventional linguistic and social factors. The results from these analyses show that a salient dialectal feature (velarized laterals) patterns as expected with traditional variationist research, but only with young females. Meanwhile a less salient dialectal feature (postalveolar affricates) does not pattern as expected regardless of demographics. Factors such as social networks and language ideologies do not reliably account for how these and other variables pattern.

These results are triangulated with metapragmatic commentary of IG speakers discussing their language. Metapragmatic discourse reveals specific social meaning attributed to these dialectal features and to IG holistically. Speakers appeal to chronotopic relationships with their language use and IG identity, which represents cosmopolitanism and urban sophistication that contrasts with SMG. IG speakers’ awareness of dialectal differences and qualities associated with such differences are then used to form characterological figures that reinforce an IG identity in opposition with SMG. Laterals serve as an index of IG identity for all IGs, whereas postalveolar affricates do not have the same social meaning, which aligns with how these features pattern in the community. As a result, the variation seen in IG cannot be explained by traditional methods alone. Knowledge of the specific IG sociohistorical context is important because social meaning is crucially what drives language change.
 

The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental and inessential. Language, so the story goes, could get along perfectly well without them. The characteristics of language are independent of reflexive discourse — independent of how in metadiscourse we talk about language and its characteristics. This paper challenges this web of received opinion by asking: What might ‘first-order’ language be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it — that is, if there were no ‘second order’ metalinguistic practices? By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, the conclusion arrived at is that without ‘second-order’, reflexive properties, ‘first order’ language itself could not exist.  Language is essentially reflexive.

Typographic mimicry is the wrapping of writing in a “foreign dress,” i.e. the use of typefaces in which one’s script (e.g. Latin) is made to visually resemble a different script (e.g. Chinese) with the goal of evoking associations with a “foreign” culture. First, this paper addresses the formal aspects of this practice, specifically the choice of visual features to be mimicked. The core part then focuses on typographic mimicry as a social practice and includes a discussion of both the typographic knowledge that different actors – both lay and expert producers and recipients – must apply to establish and recognise the associated cultural indexicality and the typographic ideologies (i.e. beliefs and attitudes) these actors hold. The central question being investigated is how typographic mimicry is discursively negotiated. An exemplary metapragmatic discourse analysis of online reactions to a food ad and comments to two articles covering the topic catered at readers with different knowledge backgrounds highlights that typographic mimicry is not a “neutral” practice. It shows that central aspects being debated are the (re)appropriation of cultural stereotypes by users both outside and within the respective cultures and the related question of whether using typographic mimicry is generally (in)appropriate (or even racist).

Large-scale social and political debates can be understood as dynamic and inter-discursive networks in which a multiplicity of subject positions are being activated, challenged and negotiated in attempts to fix the meanings of practices, abstract categories, norms, values, identities, histories and spaces that shape the lives of citizens as well as their relationships with each other. Such debates take place across a multiplicity of speech events and media and are often marked by a great deal of repetition and reiteration. This results in a high degree of predictability that becomes especially obvious in debates that concern issues of diversity and migration. As a case in point, we can take a look at the debates surrounding the folkloristic figure of Black Pete in the Netherlands. Black Pete is the counter-part of Saint Nicolas or Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. He is a cherished black-faced figure enacted by white men and/or women for most, and a racist remnant of colonial times for others. Since 2013, debates concerning the racist character of Black Pete have flared up to the point where the UN and various courts in the Netherlands became involved. Anti-racist activists calling for a reconsideration, adaptation or abolishment of the figure of Black Pete have faced death threats while the majority of the population is clinging to the traditional Black Pete / Saint Nicolas binary pair. In this highly emotional debate, some people have changed their mind though. Such a reconsideration does not only involve a practice of positioning oneself towards Black Pete, but also a complex re-articulation of the various voices that constitute the debate in the first place. Using a discourse analytical framework. This paper will focus on a case study in which a video-blogger engages in such a complex reconsideration of the debates and practices surrounding the celebration of Saint Nicolas. By focusing on the meta-pragmatic discursive strategies deployed by this blogger, we seek to gain deeper insight in the development of critical subjectivities in the public realm.

As language teaching becomes more professionalized, more importance is placed on ensuring the certification and preparation of TESOL practitioners entering the field (see Mullock, 2006). High schools, private conversation schools, universities as well as other teaching contexts increasingly seek language teachers who demonstrate the proper credentials. This shift in hiring standards now means that the expectation that second language teachers display of a sufficient standard of Teacher Language Awareness (TLA), or teacher knowledge about language, in order to ensure the successful fulfillment pedagogic duties has taken on more currency.

This article explores the ways in which 'gangsta' English features are deployed, evaluated and adopted in two types of social media, the web forum and Twitter, within the domains of hip hop culture and football (soccer) culture, from the dual perspective of authenticity and normativity. Empirically, we aim to break new ground by investigating the intricate interconnections between two social media formats and combining two highly popular but previously seldom connected cultural forms-football and hip hop. Our theoretical aim is to contribute to the current debate on authenticity, normativity, popular culture and social media, and the complex ways in which they are connected. We focus, first, on the Twitter writing of the Finnish footballer Mikael Forssell, specifically his uses of non-Standard English and references to hip hop culture and rap music, and second, on the ways in which Forssell's stylized writing elicits normatively oriented metapragmatic commentaries, i.e., meta-level discussion, on a major Finnish football discussion forum. Of particular interest here is the emically emerging category of 'gangsta' English and its perceived (in)authenticity-when used by Forssell and two other ('White') middle-class Finnish footballers. Drawing on the frameworks of authenticity and sociolinguistic superdiversity, we foreground the tension between purist normativity and playful appropriation online. Our discussion highlights the unpredictability of the connections between language use, (popular) cultural forms, ethnicity, country of origin, and the complexity of mediation across online and offline sites of social action.

This chapter introduces linguistic pragmatics as a poststructuralist perspective on language use, context and the self. It introduces a notion of articulation enriched by pragmatic insights. Exemplifying the value of his approach, Zienkowski analyses how one of his interviewees delineates boundaries for interpretation in talk about integration policy. He traces pragmatics back to its origins in pragmatism, philosophy of language and enunciative linguistics. The author argues that discourse and language use are characterised by negotiability, variability and adaptability. He considers metapragmatic or metadiscursive awareness to be preconditions for political awareness to emerge. Without an ability to perform and index (one’s relationship to) wider discursive realities by means of metadiscourse, it would be impossible to articulate critique or to engage in political engagement. If your library has access to SpringerLink you may download this chapter or the entire book via the link provided above.

This paper discusses the articulations between the differentiations of bodies and the invention of languages. As post-colonial and decolonial authors and feminist authors point out, in spite of their central role in the construction and classification of languages, bodies tend to become invisible in the scholarship. To explore this intersection between scholarship on language and bodies, this paper argues that (1) there are two fields of contemporary studies that can account for the junction of differentiations of bodies and the differentiations of languages, namely feminist studies on intersectionality and studies on metapragmatics and metadiscursive regimes about languages; and (2) epistemic violence is the best category to explain some perverse consequences of this unction, since appropriation and effacement work together to invent languageless differences.

Providing an ontology of the English language and how it is conceptualized in a foreign country is an ambitious undertaking; however Philip Seargeant, with his volume The Idea of English in Japan: Ideology and the Evolution of a Global Language, provides a compact, anthropological investigation of this issue through a careful selection of case studies as well as thought-provoking analysis. It is a study particularly refreshing to see, as Japan is still fairly underrepresented in world Englishes literature. For sociolinguists and Japanologists alike, this book is a welcome addition to the current literature on language and society in Japan. It assertively questions how linguistic ideologies are reproduced and the implications these ideologies have on how English is viewed globally.

Language is involved in processes of group identification in that it provides a focus for explicit discourses of identity and constitutes a field of less overt practices for creating groupness. Drawing on examples from Mauritian television broadcasting, this study traces the ethnicization of Mauritian Bhojpuri as a “Hindu language” through the hierarchization and subsuming of linguistic practices under larger language labels with ethno-national significance. Purist forms of Mauritian Bhojpuri that are locally perceived as “intermediate” registers between Hindi and Bhojpuri are used to represent Hindi as a language spoken in Mauritius, and at the same time to link Mauritian Bhojpuri ideologically to Hindu identity. This blurring of language boundaries serves a Hindu nationalist agenda in a diasporic location by establishing new links between linguistic forms and ethno-national values.

This article explores evaluations of impoliteness and over-politeness in crime novel dialogues, in reference to the Pragmatics of Politeness and the Discursive Model (Watts, 2003, 2005, 2010; Locher and Watts, 2005). Metapragmatic comments, in which dialogue participants evaluate the ongoing communicative behaviour, offer important insights into the values and social norms that make up interaction. Literary dialogues, as opposed to naturally occurring conversations, have the advantage of offering numerous metapragmatic comments. This study examines police investigator dialogues that contain metapragmatic comments of impoliteness and over-politeness, concentrating on two maverick figures, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based John Rebus and Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian Salvo Montalbano, both of whose fractiousness in regards to procedural rules extends to social norms as well. The first part of the analysis looks at impoliteness, confirming the image of the maverick for whom impoliteness is fairly stereotypical . The determining factor is police rank: I find frequent institutional, that is, legitimized, and unchallenged impoliteness by the higher in rank. Secondly, I look at instances of over-politeness. The inspector, who readily uses insincere politeness in order to manipulate a suspect or a witness, is sceptical when evaluating politeness in others. By not commenting on impoliteness and through extensive negative evaluations of politeness, the narrator creates a protagonist who has become disenchanted with politeness and uses impoliteness as if it were normal, appropriate behaviour. Keywords: politeness; impoliteness; over-politeness; rudeness; metapragmatic comment; dialogue; insincerity; appropriateness; inappropriateness

This chapter traces briefly the origins and development of the ethnography of language policy. It argues that, although this tradition has put ethnography firmly on the language policy research agenda since the turn of the 21st century, it has not yet sufficiently addressed some persistent challenges. These include: a) the reproduction of dichotomies, such as that of agency/structure, that go against well-established developments in both social theory and communication studies; b) a focus on explicit commentaries on policy documents by participants, which are taken as the primary context of interpretation; c) an event-based entry point to data collection/analysis that is taken as the relevant platform to understand the implementation and appropriation of policies in a given context, even in multi-sited research where a compound of events is defined a priori by researchers; and d) a tendency towards portrayals where research participants appear as mere ciphers in the matrix. Against this background, matepragmatics is presented as suitable epistemological framework to overcome some of these challenges, one that draws from two contemporary shifts in the study of texts, contexts and meanings within the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, namely: 1) a departure from emphasis on denotational meanings, towards closer description of performative actions; and 2) a displacement of the analytical entry point, from communicative events to trajectories of identification. These shifts are examined with reference to some existing work in LPP, and illustrated via previous ethnographic work that is revisited through the proposed lens. Some of the implications are also derived in relation to the study of LPP processes under conditions of late modernity.

The Kazak honorific system has been described to consist of a number of second person forms and terms of address. In addition to these core honorific expressions, however, my recent study of spoken Kazak in the Chinese Altai reveals that there are many other politeness features-both linguistic and non-linguistic-that constitute a loosely integrated honorific register system. They include grammatical distinctions (e.g., singular/plural, past/perfect, confirmative/non-confirmative), lexical distinctions (e.g., Chinese titles/Kazak kin terms), prosody (e.g., loud/quiet, fast/slow), as well as non-linguistic features (e.g., smoking/ non-smoking, male facial hair grown/removed, serving of black tea/milk tea). This paper describes these "non-core" expressions and the semiotic processes in which they, together with the core expressions, form a dichotomous system of contrast between plain and honorific registers.

Zienkowski concludes that political awareness and engagement require reflexive rearticulations of one’s sense of self with a dynamic network of signifiers, identities, practices and institutions. It also implies the articulation of interpretive logics that challenge hegemonic discourse. Debates about equality, diversity and integration can be counted among the most emotionally challenging language games subjects may engage in. Political awareness often emerges in response to emotionally challenging feelings of misrecognition. Without a metapragmatic ability to articulate such experiences to political theories, explanations or narratives, subjects run the risk of getting ensnared in hegemonic logics that leave little room for reflexivity and critique. A heightened degree of metapragmatic and political awareness allows subjects to loosen—but not to lose—the interpretive and ideological hold of hegemony. If your library has access to Springer Link you can download this book chapter or the entire book using the link provided above.

The present paper examines how interpersonal ritual notions are appropriated in intercultural contact, hence filling a knowledge gap in intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics. As a case study, we examine how the English metalexeme ‘heckling’ has been appropriated in Chinese and Japanese cultures. We argue that the history and pragmatic features of native heckling metalexemes in Chinese and Japanese strongly influence the way in which English ‘heckling’ has been incorporated into these cultures. By studying the relationship between intercultural appropriation and metalexical history, we aim to draw attention to the importance of examining culture-specific metalexemes in intercultural research on rituals and other interpersonal pragmatic phenomena.

Abstract Flattery is a social phenomenon that treads a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior and brings forward the strategic element of language use. Although flattery has been studied in other areas of the social sciences (namely marketing and social psychology), pragmatic literature has not addressed the phenomenon, despite its potential to inform the interpretive process participants engage in when evaluating politeness strategies in interactions. This study aims to understand what flattery is by examining its perception and uses in a specific speech community – native Hebrew speakers in Israel. A meta-pragmatic methodology was used to collect two complementary corpora: solicited reports of flattery events for an interpersonal level analysis, and public flattery events from a large online database for a societal level analysis. Findings indicate how participants judge an action to be flattery, what (verbal) acts count as flattery, and the functions of flattery in interactions. Ultimately, a definition is offered against the backdrop of flattery being perceived as the dark side of sociability.

Ήταν ένας από τους σπουδαιότερους γλωσσολόγους της εποχής μας. Τα γραπτά του, εκτιμώ, θ’ ανακαλύπτονται τα επόμενα χρόνια, τις επόμενες δεκαετίες ίσως, ενώ τα γραπτά άλλων γλωσσολόγων, πολύ διασημότερων τώρα, θα ξεχνιούνται. Αναγκαστικά, μιλώ εδώ για το έργο του προτού αυτό ανακαλυφθεί.

It is ironic that, before the advent of the institutionalized practice we call "modern linguistics", the notion of language as a normative activity was central to discourse on language.  But the complex ideological process of defining modern linguistics as the scientific study of language involved the explicit exclusion of issues of linguistic normativity.  To determine how best to redefine linguistics we must first examine how it came to be given its current definition.  Following this, the paper discusses the implications of redefining linguistics so that, once again, the normativity of language holds a central position.