Potential AAA panel

[Andrew Tarter]

Hello All,

I'm gauging interest in the following potential panel. Please email me with comments, suggestions, and indications of your interest in presenting.

Best,

Andrew Tarter


Producing Language: 
The Semantics and Pragmatics of Masked Communicative Acts

The production and engagement of communicative acts to send information, convey nuance, issue cautionary warnings, conceal messages, assert authority, maintain boundaries, and impart esoteric knowledge is widespread.  The employment of such language devices range in form, including the use of euphemism, proverb, double entendre, idiom, analogy, metaphor, pun, riddle, metonymy, satire, allusion, word play, language games, ludlings, and others.  Use of these devices in communicative acts may diffuse tension, incite conflict, delay or instigate action, elicit laughter, or invoke other responses.

Linguists commonly refer to the task of understanding the meaning of communicative acts, with special reference to their context, as semantics and pragmatics, respectively. Communicative acts often provide important contextually relevant connotations that may be masked from the anthropologist by the nature of their more-commonly used denotata.  A major challenge for anthropologists is to decipher and understand these masked communicative acts, as well as to describe and explain them. 

Paradoxically, anthropologists often mask their own communication through culture- and audience-specific jargon. This panel broadly investigates the production and employment of creative language engagements, whether by the subjects of anthropological inquiry, or by anthropologists themselves.  We welcome papers that discuss the uses of language to implicitly or indirectly convey different kinds of information.  


Please don’t hesitate to contact me about participating on this panel.  Abstracts should be 200-250 words long and sent to: andrew.tarter at ufl.edu by April 1, 2014.


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