panel on social norming

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Ling-anthers:  I'm interested in proposing a panel on the topic of "Social
Norms and language" for AAA in November, 2001, in Washington DC.  Is
anyone else interested?  If so read on:


In recent years, legal scholarship has developed a focus on the notion of
social norms and how concern with or observation of social norms operates
to condition certain kinds of behavior, irrespective of laws or of the
presence of legal authority. As Posner (Law and Social Norms, Harvard U.
Press, 2000 puts it,

               ``Most people refrain most of the time from anti-social
behavior even when the law is absent or has no force. They conform to
social norms."  (Posner 2000:5)

          Posner also defines social norms as ``non-legal mechanisms of
cooperation."

               ``Social Norms describe the behavioral regularities that
occur in equilibrium when people use signals to show that they belong to
the good type.  Social Norms are thus endogenous;  they do not cause
behaviors but are the labels that we attach to behavior that results from
other factors. Social Norms should be distinguished from behavioral
regularities that emerge in cooperative relationships simply because they
are value maximizing."

My questions are as follows:

	a.  Is anyone in linguistic anthropology looking at this paradigm
in the study of language policy, making decisions about language, or
whatever the issues are that affect the development of standard languages,
and/or issues that some people generally subsume under "ideology?"

	b.  If so, is anyone interested in having a panel in which we
examine various policies to see whether we can discern social norms at
work in the operation of the policy?

I have been putting together some notes about this and have a page on my
website concerned with this issue at:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/dirigism/socnorms.html

If anybody is interested in discussing this more, please contact me.

Hal Schiffman

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			  Harold F. Schiffman

Professor of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture             Acting Director
Dept. of South Asia Regional Studies                  Penn Language Center
820 Williams Hall, Box 6305                   715-16, Williams Hall Box  6305
					
			University of Pennsylvania
			Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-5825	   		       	              (215) 898-6039
Fax:  (215) 573-2138				          Fax (215) 573-2139

Email:  haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn			      plc at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
WWW:  http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/    http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~plc/

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