[Linganth] AAA 2016 CFP: Sound, Materiality, and Body

[Barbara LeMaster]

Another call for papers - please share.  This is also for the 2016 AAA meetings

Dear SLA Members,

We are looking for a couple of more participants for our panel.  If you are interested, then please send your abstract to me as soon as possible for consideration in joining our panel.  Our draft panel session abstract is below:

EXPLETIVES, SWEARING, IDENTITY AND STANCE
This panel focuses on the uses of expletives, swearing, or taboo language, its potential as a vehicle for speaker stance, and its relationship within cultural frameworks involving issues of religion, gender, and other relavancies. The panel shares a sociolinguistic perspective of swearing that comes out of more recent literatures focusing on the what, the how, and the why of using taboo language, either natively, or through cross-cultural borrowing. The papers in the panel are thus interested in the way that uses of taboo language both reflect gendered and/or culturally situated norms about the "speakable" and the "unspeakable" and the ways in which they may contest, resist or transform those norms. Two of the papers in the panel (Miller, Winters and LeMaster) examine the specific ways in which "other-languageness" of English and ASL swear words/signs change or attenuate their social meanings and uses in Japanese-speaking and other-than-ASL linguistic contexts. LeMaster explores how norms and practices regarding swearing among college students have changed over decades in relation to both religion and gender. Another theme addressed in the panel is the way the use of taboo language can be used to assert social identities and/or stances. That is, individuals who swear exploit its oppositional meaning potential against the backdrop of culturally specific norms of tasteful speech to project a desired social image or position. The range of these social identities and stances varies across the different data sets from the less serious/more playful in Miller's and in Winters and LeMaster's data to the more serious and statically-situated uses in LeMaster's retrospective on college students' uses of taboo language.  In all the papers, swearing emerges as a creative site for social action, and as a barometer of continuity and change in social norms.



Dr. Barbara LeMaster
Director, ASL Linguistics and Deaf Cultures Program
Linguistics Search Committee, Chair
Professor,
Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics
CSULB, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard
Long Beach, CA 90840
Office:  FO3-322
Phone: (562) 985-5037
Fax:  (562) 985-4371
Email: Barbara.LeMaster at csulb.edu
Website: http://www.csulb.edu/~lemaster

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