Metapragmatics

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.

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,

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.

Saussurean and Chomskyan “conduit” views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson’s view of systems infused with more recent linguistic-anthropological insights into the ideologically mediated and indexically organized “total linguistic fact”, this paper argues for a view of meaning in terms of complex open systems in which complex units of analysis invite more precise distinctions within “meaning”. Using online viral memes and the metapragmatic qualifier of “cool” as cases in point, we see that the meaning of such memes is better described as a range of “effects”, most of them nonlinear and not predictable on the basis of the features of the sign itself. The effects are generated by the “virality” of the sign, i.e. they reside in the rapid “sharing” practice itself. Such effects suggest a revised and broader notion of nonlinear “perlocution”.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

A B S T R A C T This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own "structural oblivion" —that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call " lingwashing " : using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.

Logographically written languages offer rich possibilities for the use of iconic signs and configurations to encode meaning alongside ordinary denotational textuality. Although indexical iconism has been used to clarify the micro-structure of conversational interactions and other performances, this paper looks at implicit metapragmatics within the text-artifact itself in two test beds (European concrete poetry and Tang Chinese poetry), before turning to Sumerian literary materials from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800–1600 BCE). The absence of theoretical treatises from this period has often led to the suggestion that there was no theory in ancient Mesopotamia, but this paper argues that Mesopotamian “theory” resides in the implicit metapragmatics of the same cuneiform signs that also generate the denotational meaning of the text.► Internally complex logograms model metapragmatic structure in various scripts. ► Modernist and Tang poetry provide good case studies with explicit theoretical texts. ► No explicit metapragmatics (viz. commentaries) in earlier Sumerian literature. ► Diagrammatic form of complex logograms acts in place of explicit metapragmatics.

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.

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 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.

Temporal indexicality is deeply involved in the production of imagined communities. This article shows how the cultivation of Hindi as an “ancestral language” among Hindus in Mauritius mediates between two different modes of temporality while shaping diasporic identities. Diasporic ideologies of ancestral language are further shown to articulate with the creation of sacred geographies in the context of an annual Hindu pilgrimage.

For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition.  The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: an indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly attributed to language and language-users and which therefore seem to stand in need of explanation.  In recent years, naturalistic research programs in the cognitive sciences have provided illuminating explanations of basic (“lower-order”) cognitive phenomena. The challenge today for the science of language is whether, in transforming itself along the lines of epistemological naturalism, it can provide similarly illuminating explanations of any of its traditional explananda.  In addressing this challenge, greater attention needs to be given to the source of such explananda in the everyday, culturally-diverse practices of folk metalinguistics.

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.

How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of behavioral patterns, anatomical structures, and neurological processes to the world of the linguistic phenomena referred to by the expressions of commonsense metalinguistic discourse: words, meanings, names, truth, languages, understanding, and so on? Rejecting the positions both of sceptical eliminativism and of linguistic immanence, this paper argues that the linguistic identity of language emerges only gradually, by means of the child’s increasingly competent participation in the discursive processes of reflexive enculturation.

Published: January  2010 Language Sciences 32(1): 14-27

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.

A sociolinguistic analysis of emotion in Iranian culture and language use is developed. The work of Friedrich, Bateson, and others is drawn on to indicate how emotion is represented though metacommunicative, paralinguistic, and stylistic elements of language use. Communicative contexts in Iranian culture are marked in terms of two continua: one of personal and communicative intimacy, from “inside” (baten) to “outside” (zaher), and another of social hierarchy, from contexts indicating hierarchical relationships to those indicating equality. Affectivity in Persian language use is represented through intensification of a statement in relation to its contextual frame, through transposition of a linguistic form appropriate for one frame into another, or through culturally marked withdrawal from social interaction. It is argued that since emotions and psychological characteristics of individuals cannot be observed directly, attention should be focused on the expressive rules of culture rather than on “character” or “personality.”

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.

"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 study explores ritualisation in intercultural contact, i.e. it looks into the way in which ritual practices spread across cultures. It examines heckling as a case study, by reconstructing the way in which the British concept of electoral ‘heckling’ has been appropriated in China, as China adopted the parliamentary system in the early 20th century mainly under British influence. The present research fills two knowledge gaps in historical sociopragmatics: it integrates intercultural pragmatics into historical sociopragmatic research, and also it inquiries into the process of ritualisation, which is a long overdue task.

Although an increasing number of sociolinguistic researchers consider functions of voice qualities as stylistic features, few studies consider cases where voice qualities serve as the primary signs of speech registers. This article addresses this gap through the presentation of a case study of Lachixío Zapotec speech registers indexed though falsetto, breathy, creaky, modal, and whispered voice qualities. I describe the system of contrastive speech registers in Lachixío Zapotec and then track a speaker on a single evening where she switches between three of these registers. Analyzing line-by-line conversational structure I show both obligatory and creative shifts between registers that co-occur with shifts in the participant structures of the situated social interactions. I then examine similar uses of voice qualities in other Zapotec languages and in the two unrelated language families Nahuatl and Mayan to suggest the possibility that such voice registers are a feature of the Mesoamerican culture area. (Voice quality, register, performance, metapragmatics, Mesoamerica, Zapotecan, Mayan, Nahuatl)*

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

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.

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 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.

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.

In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love claims that modern linguistics is based on “a cultural metafiction” and that it must “emancipate itself from what is no more than a profoundly important but nonetheless culturally parochial way of construing linguistic phenomena.”  This paper reviews Love’s account of the historical sources and modern consequences of this cultural metafiction and asks why it is so frustratingly difficult to emancipate the language sciences from its epistemological presuppositions. In addressing this question, the paper explores the accountability of expert metalinguistic discourse in the language sciences to the normative rhetoric of commonplace metalinguistic practices—or, in Wittgenstein’s distinctive use of the term, to the ‘grammar’ of those practices.  This normative accountability, it is argued, is an ineliminable component of the cultural-discursive ecology within which expert metadiscourse in the language sciences must live and make any sense that it is able to make.

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 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.

In this paper, I offer a situated perspective on the political and semiotic landscapes of the circulation of racist and antiracist images and texts in and around a dark-skinned female character, Adelaide, in the popular Brazilian TV show Zorra Total. I aim to differ and defer the character as a sign, in order to undermine the character's hegemonic frame of interpretation. First, I contextualize some resources used in a typical episode, including the character's performance as a trajectory of racist signs about the black woman's body. Next, I discuss the contemporary circulation of the character, confronted by the experience of discussing this character in an undergraduate classroom. In conclusion, I argue that by exposing trajectories of the black female body, it is possible to gather together its fragmented signs as a multi-layered and overlapping set, and I identify these trajectories as a blind spot in the history of Brazilian racism.

This paper reviews discourse-based approaches to language attitudes in terms of their contributions to understanding the creation of socio-indexical meaning in metalinguistic discourse. It proposes a five-level typology of approaches which includes topic-oriented, linguistic, cognitive, interactional, and rhetorical analyses. The article discusses the ways in which different types of analyses expose various aspects of social-semiotic and meta-semiotic processes involved in constructions of sociolinguistic indexical relations in the local interactional and larger contextual frames. The paper argues in favor of integrated discourse-based approaches and illustrates the potential of a rhetorical approach to serve as a unifying framework for blending analytical levels.

In this chapter, Jan Zienkowski provides a heuristic for analysing large-scale interpretive processes or logics articulated by activists and intellectuals who seek to construe an alternative mode of politics and subjectivity within the Flemish/Belgian minority debate. In a series of case studies, he demonstrates how people deal with problems of ideological misrecognition and interpellation when dominant discourses do not correspond to one’s sense of self. The analyses show that feelings of misrecognition frequently function as catalysts for the development of political awareness. However, the articulation of a preferred mode of politics and subjectivity requires the careful articulation of a complex interpretive logic that articulates multiple identities, experiences, signifiers, narratives and other ideological elements of discourse. If your library has access to Springer Link you can download this book chapter or the entire book via the link provided above.