Call for Papers AAA09 - Ways of speaking as ideological means and ends

[Mark Sicoli]

Call for papers AAA09-

"The ends of prosody: Ways of speaking as ideological means and ends”

The papers for this session are ethnographically grounded works in
linguistic anthropology that connect the micro-structure of linguistic
prosody with larger order ideological and material productions, social and
political actions, and the positioning of speakers who embody/perform
sociocultural roles in dialogic interactions.

We invite ethnographic accounts of prosody (intonation, rhythm, voice
qualities) and other poetic devices for achieving social actions through
speaking.  Our focus is on prosody because of its simultaneous attachment
to both the form of the message and to the ends of the utterance.  At once
prosody functions metalinguistically, indexing constituents of a
linguistic code, and metapragmatically, indexing speech event, register,
and distinctions among speakers.  In an ever present, but under theorized,
layering of the modalities of speech performance, contextualized social
actions are achieved through configurations of a text, the way a text is
framed prosodically, and the way it is grounded in, and grounding of, an
interactive context.  Rather than study prosody as an end itself of
linguistic description, or as micro-structural detail of a conversation
apart from its role in cultural (re)production, we consider prosody as
bridging language and culture requiring linguistic analysis as part of
rich ethnographic descriptions linking speech forms to the social and
ideological ends of positioned social actors.

Please contact Mark Sicoli <mark.sicoli at mpi.nl> and Matthew Wolfgram
<wolfgram at umich.edu> with paper proposals.


-- 
Dr. Mark Sicoli
Postdoctoral Researcher
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Postbus 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands

Tel:
+31(0)24 352-1263 (direct)
+31(0)24 352-1911 (operator)
+31(0)24 352-1300 (fax)

mark.sicoli at mpi.nl