Cliches

[Jim Wilce]

I tried to send this response to Ron Kephart yesterday. Here it is …

Jim

I think it's important to recognize here, as in all instances, the role 
of language ideologies, and also perhaps to introduce (or at least keep 
in mind since all of them might not go over equally well on air) notions 
like text, interdiscursive chains, and circulation.

First, some sort of an ideology of language that views the individual as 
author of her utterance, and valorizes individual creativity/authorship 
over anything like conventionality. The connections of such an ideology 
to broader cultural patterns need not be mentioned here.

Then, it seems perfectly obvious to me that what we call clichés are 
texts and circulate as such, having managed by some feat of 
entextualization to move beyond some initiatory event of use, some 
baptismal event, and to circulate with more or (increasingly) less 
conscious reference back to such an event. In cases where such baptismal 
events are mass mediated—and here we have idioms that come into popular 
use from, for example, films—users might feel that they add some sort of 
luster to their speech by indexically anchoring it to such origins 
(Savan 2005).

Asif Agha's just-released book, Language and Social Relations, provides 
excellent background to such issues as interdiscursive chains. On the 
circulation of even smaller bits of "text" (as small as particular uses 
of "we," see Greg Urban's 2001 book, Metaculture).

Savan, Leslie
2005 Popspeak. New York Times Magazine July 10, 2005 p. 16. (You can 
find a copy here: 
http://andeesworld.blogspot.com/2005/07/popspeak-by-leslie-savan.html)

-- 
Striving to teach and publish the best in linguistic anthropology--an ethnographic approach to the analysis of semiotic and discursive forms in relation to sociocultural processes

Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Box 15200
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200
Bldg. 98D, Room 101E
928-523-2729
jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22