Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics

This volume examines the complexities of the processes and practices of multilingualism in a wide range of economic, cultural, political and physical peripheral sites and spaces (tourism, education, indigenous and minority language rights and politics, gender relations, marketing, airports) in different geographic locations (Austria, Canada, Corsica, Catalonia, Finland, Ireland, Patagonia, Spain, Slovenia, U.S.A., Wales). Using approaches that draw on sociolinguistics, discourse studies and ethnography, different peripheral indigenous and minority language sites varying from Arctic territories to a busy airport in Wales are examined. The volume brings together these different contexts and approaches in order to explore what kind of possible commonalities and differences might arise from processes of peripheralizing and centralising in multilingual indigenous and minority language sites. The perspective opens up new ways of thinking and theorising about multilingualism and about cores and peripheries, and necessarily involves a challenge to existing notions of straightforward power relations (e.g. majority-minority; centre-periphery etc.). It questions assumptions about peripheries as less fortunate counterparts to prosperous centres, and suggests instead that peripheries are diverse, multilingual spaces, constructed by but, crucially, constitutive to cores.

Nationalism has informed all our ideas about language, culture, identity, nation, and state. Those ideas are being profoundly challenged by globalization, neoliberal responses to it, and the emergent new economy. Language, culture, and identity are commodified; communication takes on a central role as work process and work product in the new economy; multilingualism becomes a salient element of managing the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, and, indeed, of their very value. Through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of key sites of production of discourse constructing the idea of “francophone Canada” from the 1970s to the present, the author shows how hegemonic discourses of language, identity, and the nation-state are destabilized under new political economic conditions, in processes which, she argues, put us on the path to post-nationalism. Examining sociolinguistic practices in workplaces, schools, community associations, NGOs, state agencies, and sites of tourism and performance across francophone North America and Europe, she shows how the tensions of late modernity produce competing visions of social organization and competing sources of legitimacy in attempts to reimagine—or resist reimagining—who we are.

Every language has a way of expressing possessive relationships. The marking and the conceptualization of these vary across languages and cultures. This volume aims at investigating the varied facets of possession and associated notions, including association and modification. We focus on correlations between language and culture in the ways in which possessive relationships can have their linguistic correlates. The volume starts with a typological introduction outlining the marking, and the meaning, of possession within a noun phrase, a clause, and a sentence, focusing on correlations between possessive structures, and cultural and social aspects of its conceptualization by the speakers. It is followed by revised versions of fourteen of the fifteen presentations from the International Workshop ‘Possession and Ownership’, held at the Language and Culture Research Group, the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, 27 September - 2 October 2010.

‘When, why, and how did language evolve?’ ‘Why do only humans have language?’ This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men. The authors are prominent linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, social anthropologists, and specialists in artificial intelligence. As well as explaining what is understood about the evolution of language, they look squarely at the formidable obstacles to knowing more: the absence of direct evidence, for example; the problems of using indirect evidence; the lack of a common conception of language; confusion about the operation of natural selection and other processes of change; the scope for misunderstanding in a multi-disciplinary field, and many more. Despite these difficulties, the authors in their contributions to this book are able to show just how much has been achieved in this area of research in the social, natural, and cognitive sciences.

Antibiotics will soon no longer be able to cure common illnesses such as strep throat, sinusitis, and middle ear infections as they have done previously. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing at a much faster rate than new antibiotics to treat them are being developed. The prescription of antibiotics for viral illnesses is a key cause of increasing bacterial resistance. Despite this fact, many children continue to receive antibiotics unnecessarily for the treatment of viral upper respiratory tract infections. Why do American physicians continue to prescribe inappropriately given the high social stakes of this action? The answer appears to lie in the fundamentally social nature of medical practice: physicians do not prescribe as the result of a clinical algorithm but prescribe in the context of a conversation with a parent and a child. Thus, physicians have a classic social dilemma which pits individual parents and children against a greater social good. This book examines parent-physician conversations in detail, showing how parents put pressure on doctors in largely covert ways. It also shows how physicians yield to this seemingly subtle pressure evidencing that apparently small differences in wording have important consequences for diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Following parents use of these interactional practices, physicians are more likely to make concessions, alter their diagnosis or alter their treatment recommendation. This book also shows how small changes in the way physicians present their findings and recommendations can decrease parent pressure for antibiotics. It carefully documents the important and observable link between micro social interaction and macro public health domains.

This book deals with a specific form of language change: deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers. These manipulations are based and depending on cultural and social contexts, they are often—if not always—considered to be secret, and are at the same time expressions of difference and power. The central thesis on which the explorations of manipulated language in this book are based is that language here—deliberately diverging from the norm—is central to the construction of social norms, and that exactly by manipulation and alteration identity may be explored and defined. Manipulated language and deliberate linguistic change are thus seen as the creation of a medium through which speakers attempt to preserve certain structures. The complexity and diversity of linguistic manipulation and how it is linked to the structure of society are dealt with in this book by referring to secrecy, mimesis, sacrilege, and ambiguity as leading concepts of power. This study concentrates on case studies from the Jukun-speaking areas of Nigeria, as well as Nilotic and Bantu-speaking parts of Uganda (and to a lesser extent Sudan), but also presents data on manipulated languages from many other parts and speaker communities of the continent, as well as examples from the African diaspora.

Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. This book considers how spoken language first emerged. It gives an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal — that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neural structures connecting perception and production. It explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. It demonstrates that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset is inexorably led to a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.

The more than 2 million predominantly bilingual Spanish speakers from different parts of Latin America who live in New York City make it an ideal setting to study language contact and dialectal leveling. The Spanish feature under study is presence versus absence of subject personal pronouns (e.g., yo canto, “I sing” ~ canto, “I sing”). Variationist sociolinguistic research is conducted through bivariate analyses of pronoun occurrence rates and multivariate hierarchical analyses of the social, grammatical, and discourse-communicative factors that probabilistically condition the use of pronouns. Statistical results based on 60,000 pronouns extracted from interviews with a stratified sample of 140 first- and second-generation Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, and Cubans show that contact with English and convergence between speakers from different Latin American regions are molding new forms of Spanish in New York. As predicted, pronoun occurrence rates are higher, and regional rate differences are smaller, in New York than in Latin America. Ranges and rankings of constraint hierarchies are also different in New York, as predicted by contact and leveling hypotheses. The book also studies the opposite force, namely, preservation of the patterns of the Latin American reference lects, even in the Spanish of English-dominant bilinguals. No relationship is seen between pronominal patterns affected by English and reduced proficiency, and a critique is offered of the connection between simplification and incomplete acquisition.

All communication involves acts of stance, in which speakers take up positions vis-à-vis the expressive, referential, interactional, and social implications of their speech. This book brings together contributions in a new and dynamic current of academic explorations of stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Drawing on data from such diverse contexts as advertising, tourism, historical texts, naturally occurring conversation, classroom interaction, and interviews, leading authors in the field of sociolinguistics in this volume explore how linguistic stancetaking is implicated in the representation of self, personal style and acts of stylization, and self- and other-positioning. The analyses also focus on how speakers deploy and take up stances vis-à-vis sociolinguistic variables and the critical role of stance in the processes of indexicalization: how linguistic forms come to be associated with social categories and meanings. In doing so, many of the authors address critical issues of power and social reproduction, examining how stance is implicated in the production, reproduction, and potential change of social and linguistic hierarchies and ideologies. This volume and its introduction both map out the terrain of existing sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research on stance, synthesize how it relates to existing theoretical orientations, and identify a framework for future research.

This work is a sociolinguistic study employing quantitative methods to explore age, gender, and social class differences in the use of a range of discourse features. It is based on a gender-balanced sample of middle-class and working-class adolescents and adults, recorded under the same conditions in Glasgow, Scotland. Unlike studies of phonetic or morphological variation, the study of discourse variation requires samples of talk in action with speakers interacting with one another. The speakers, who knew each other, were recorded talking in the presence of the tape-recorder for approximately half an hour without the investigator being present. The recordings were transcribed in their totality and the transcripts searched for the occurrence of features such as the use of pronouns, adverbs, you know, I mean, as well as grammatical features such as questions and passive voice. The frequencies of use of the variables by the different social groups (e.g., middle-class women, adolescent boys) were calibrated and the results compared. Differences between adults and adolescents provided the greatest number of statistically significant results, followed by differences between males and females. The smallest number of statistically significant differences were related to social class. Qualitative analysis, however, revealed important social class differences in discourse styles. The study shows the danger of generalizing about social class or gender on the basis of a limited sample of a few discourse features.