[Linganth] AAA Panel Invitation

[ghazaryanl at g.ucla.edu]

Dear all,

We invite papers for a panel for the AnnualMeeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), taking place in St.Louis, MO in November 2020. If interested, please submit an abstract (max.250-word) to Lilit Ghazaryan (ghazaryanl at ucla.edu) by March 25,2020.

 Title: Highlighting Language:  The InteractionalFocusing of Code



 Abstract:

This panel investigates mechanismsthrough which language becomes salient as a code in ongoing discourse. Researchon reflexivity in language has long been a cornerstone of linguisticanthropology (Silverstein 1976; Babcock 1980; Bauman and Briggs 1990). Thecapacity of discourse to simultaneously function as medium and object of communicationlies at the heart of metapragmatic phenomena such as reported speech,translation, deictics, or poetics, and the like (Lucy 1993; Silverstein 1993).These all make pragmatically salient, and therefore “highlight (Goodwin 1994),”different aspects of discourse as their respective objects, in more or lessexplicit ways. While reflexivity pervades language at all levels, one type ofmetapragmatic discourse explicitly deals with the code itself (sensu Jakobson1956). For example, “correcting” someone’s pronunciation or teaching thephoneme of a different language, inevitably highlight the form a linguisticsignal takes. In this panel, we are interested in such phenomena, yet we askspecifically: Can we draw attention to the code but without the use of overtlymetapragmatic expressions. In other words, how is the linguistic codehighlighted without explicitly talking about it?

 We invite papers exploring themechanisms that highlight language yet which do not rely on explicitmetapragmatic expressions. We are especially interested in strategies such asrepairs (Schegloff et al. 1977), recasts (Chouinard and Clark 2003),repetitions (Rossi 2019), replacements (Sidnell and Barnes 2013), and recyclingof prior talk (Goodwin 2018), as well as prosody, other aspects of delivery,and nonverbal means, which are likely to play crucial roles. Such strategiesfor interactional highlighting may certainly occur in talk that also includesovertly metapragmatic discourse. We do not want to disregard the latter, yet wehope to focus on the particular work that is accomplished by the former. Whilewe hope to analyze specifically those practices where the attention is onlinguistic form, we recognize that often some aspects of the code ishighlighted in order to also achieve some other pragmatic effect—the code is,in fact, rarely the only focus of attention in metalinguistic and metapragmaticacts.

 Organizers:

Lilit Ghazaryan (UCLA)

Jan David Hauck (LSE)

 


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Lilit Ghazaryan, PhD StudentLinguistic AnthropologyUniversity of California, Los Angeles
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