Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics

This book provides a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and impassioned Greeks — sometimes with fatal results — for over two hundred years. It begins in the late 18th century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and by the different groups'contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The vernacularists — later known as demoticists — sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. The book explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, it traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. The book describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last twenty-five years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and from what it once aspired to be.

This book aims to deconstruct the myths that are traditionally reproduced as factual accounts of the historical development of English, and to reveal new myths that are currently being constructed. Using concepts and interpretive sensibilities developed in the field of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and sociocognitive linguistics over the past 40 years, the book unearths these myths and exposes their ideological roots. Based on the assumption that conventional histories of English are histories of standard English rather than histories of the varieties of English, he sets his goal as being not to construct an alternative discourse, but rather to offer alternative readings of the historical data. It defines what we mean by a linguistic ideology and shows how language myths, rather than simply being untruths about language, are derived from conceptual metaphors of language and are crucial in the formation of hegemonic discourses on language. He argues, in effect, that no discourse—a hegemonic discourse, an alternative discourse, or even a deconstructive discourse—can ever be free of ideology. The book argues that a naturalized discourse is always built on a foundation of myths, which are all too easily taken as true accounts, and is a call to study alternative ways in which the full range of “Englishes” may ultimately be accounted for historically. But the book also issues the warning that, whatever new histories are proposed, they, too, will ultimately need to undergo a thorough investigation with regard to the myths that may underlie them.

This book shows how linguistic analysis can be useful to lawyers on either sides of defamation lawsuits. It gives a brief overview of the parts of defamation law that linguistics can address, and then illustrates how phonetics, grammar, semantics, speech acts, pragmatics, conveyed meaning, and lexical choices were used in eleven defamation cases. The book also assesses what progress has been made from the early days in which language disputes were settled by bloody duels to the modern days of their replacement by libel and slander lawsuits.

Anyone who has attended law school knows that it invokes an important intellectual transformation, frequently referred to as “learning to think like a lawyer”. This process, which forces students to think and talk in radically new and toward different ways about conflicts, is directed by professors in the course of their lectures and examinations, and conducted via spoken and written language. This book delves into that legal language to reveal the complexities of how this process takes place. The book bases its linguistic study on tape recordings from first year Contracts courses in eight different law schools. The book discusses how these schools employ the Socratic method between teacher and student, forcing the student to shift away from moral and emotional terms in thinking about conflict, toward frameworks of legal authority instead. This move away from moral frameworks is key, the book says, arguing that it represents an underlying world view at the core not just of law education, but for better or worse, of the entire U.S. legal system—which, while providing a useful source of legitimacy and a means to process conflict, fails to deal systematically with aspects of fairness and social justice. The latter part of the study shows how differences in race and gender makeup among law students and professors can subtly alter this process.

This book describes the contributions of linguistics to the intelligence gathering and analysis in the legal context by showing the way evidence is analyzed in eleven perjury cases. Beginning with a brief review of perjury law, it shows how the meaning of lexicon, grammatical structures, and ambiguities are important in such cases, stressing that it would be prudent for prosecutors and defense attorneys alike to begin their review in such cases with the larger units of language, by identifying the speech event, the schemas of the participants, the agendas of the participants as revealed by the topics they introduce and the responses they make to the topics of others. Other smaller language units, such as potentially ambiguous expressions, grammatical referencing, and lexical choices, which are often considered “smoking gun” evidence, often can be better understood when seen in the larger context of the overall discourse. The book suggests that in perjury cases both the prosecution and defense can use many of the tools of linguistics that may be relatively unknown to the legal profession. It further urges that often lawyers would be prudent to call on linguists to help them whether for the prosecution or defense. Eight of the case examples describe the inadequate intelligence gathering and analysis by the prosecution and the use of linguistic tools to resolve these problems. The other three cases show how district attorneys and judges repaired failed intelligence analyses.

This book analyzes the many ways in which language plays a crucial role in sexual misconduct cases. The book describes eleven court cases for which the author served as an expert witness, and explains the issues at stake in each case for both lawyers and linguists. The book's attention is on aspects of sexual misconduct that have not previously received the attention they deserve, such as: the language evidence of sexual misconduct in the workplace; cases of adult-to-child sexual misconduct with the family; and adult-adult sexual misconduct cases. The book describes the often-used linguistic analytical tools that are available to both the prosecution and the defense, and argues that there is a particular sequence in which these tools should be used.

This volume is a book-length critique of the concept of language rights. It presents a balanced, though ultimately skeptical, evaluation of language rights. Through a sophisticated synthesis of insights from a variety of disciplines, including linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology and political philosophy, it demonstrates how the appeal to language rights faces a number of conceptual and practical problems, particularly because the discourse of rights is fundamentally inconsistent with the socially variable nature of language. The book also explores an alternative that is more in tune with the complexities of language in social life by suggesting that issues involving language are better managed within a model of deliberative democracy.

This book is about workplace discourse and it examines the relationships among leadership, ethnicity, and language use. Taking a social constructionist approach to the ways in which leadership is enacted through discourse, the book problematizes the concept of ethnicity and demonstrates the importance of context—particularly the community of practice—in determining what counts as relevant in the analysis of ethnicity. The chapters analyze everyday workplace interactions supplemented by interview data to examine the ways in which workplace leaders use language to achieve their transactional and relational goals in contrasting “ethnicized” contexts, two of which are Māori and two European/Pākehā. The analysis pays special attention to the roles of ethnic values, beliefs, and orientations in talk.

This book integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore the role of repetition in everyday family interaction. Specifically, it investigates how and why family members repeat words, phrases, paralinguistic features, and speech acts previously produced in conversation by other family members. The book presents a case‐study analysis of the discourse of three dual‐income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week; this unique data set enables analysis of repetition both within and across family conversations. Using the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics and drawing on theories from linguistics, communication, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the book's chapters collectively demonstrate how repetition serves as a crucial means of creating the complex, shared meanings that give each family its distinctive identity. The book thus uncovers how repetition in everyday talk serves as a resource for creating a family's private language or familylect, for constructing families as small‐group cultures, and for layering and negotiating meanings. In so doing, it puts forth the argument that intertextuality and framing, two powerful notions that have been applied widely (and largely independently) across disciplines, are best understood as fundamentally interconnected. The book also engages with intertextuality as both a theory and a methodological approach.

Although English is the de facto lingua franca of the Internet, most Internet users are not native speakers of English. Two-thirds of the one billion users now online communicate in other languages, in non-native English, or both. Yet the English-based scholarly literature on computer-mediated communication (CMC) does not reflect this diversity. This book analyzes text-based CMC in multiple languages other than native English. Its eighteen chapters, most of them case studies focusing on a particular language or multilingual situation, address a range of topics: writing systems and the Internet; linguistic and discourse features of local language use online; gender, language, and culture online; language choice and code switching; and linguistic diversity on the Internet, currently and projected into the future. Secondary themes addressed include playfulness and creativity in CMC; romanization of languages ordinarily written in other scripts; and comparison of CMC-specific features in various languages. The languages described include French, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Thai, Portuguese, and non-native Englishes. A wide range of CMC modes is covered, from personal email, discussion lists, and text messaging on mobile phones (asynchronous) to instant messaging, ICQ, and graphical chat (synchronous) — as used by teenagers, university students and other young people, housewives, and professionals. The book includes an introduction with numerous references.