[Linganth] Call for Papers AAA 2026: Plurals and Plural-making

[Aliyah Bixby-Driesen]

Dear SLA colleagues,

We are looking for three to five presenters to join our panel on the topic
of *Plurals and Plural-making*—please see the abstract below. Feel free to
circulate the call for papers to other colleagues who might be interested.

If you are interested in being a panelist, please email an abstract (<300
words) to Aliyah BD Dewar (aliyahbd at sas.upenn.edu) and Xiao Schutte Ke (
kxy at sas.upenn.edu) by *April 22nd*. If you have any questions or would be
interested in serving as a discussant, feel free to reach out as well.

*Title: *Plurals

*Panel abstract*:
Worlds. Truths. Futures. Critical theorists and anthropologists often use
the plural inflection of common nouns as an intervention that signals a
pluralistic stance. But how are pluralities/plural realities produced,
managed, and sustained in social and semiotic practice? How do these forms
of know-how help us anticipate pluralism and pluralistic realities beyond
morphemic gesturing? In this panel, we invite papers that investigate
plurals—pluralism and plurality—as  objects of ethnographic attention. We
approach plurality as a linguistic, semiotic, and/or political dimension of
social life.

We invite panelists to think with broad genealogies of pluralistic
approaches: Inquiries into language ideologies concerning plurals (Hill and
Hill 2008, Woolard 2016) have taught us that plurality and plural-making
follow (or break) logics in culture and language rather than being
universally self-evident. Analyses of plural predicates in linguistic
semantics reveal how plural forms mask uneven distributions of properties
among individuals. In attending to metapragmatics, analysts refuse
denotational singularity, committing instead to interpreting
text-in-context and action-in-motion. The scholarship on legal pluralism
leads us to question hierarchies of, and exclusionary acts within, liberal
forms of ‘recognition’ (Griffiths 1986, Todd 2014). In the tradition of
William James’ philosophical pragmatism, pluralism can be approached as "a
pragmatics of the pluriverse—a political, experimental and pragmatic
response to the ongoing insistence of the pluralistic problematic," that
generative staying with the problem of "the world (as) both one and many"
(Savransky 2019, 144-145). Seeing from the perspective of ‘possible worlds’
(Hintikka 1967), everyday language-use of modalities, attitudes, and
quantifications constantly engages in plural-making. Here, the indexical,
the semantic, and the philosophical of plural-making converge in the
everyday stakes of social life. Innovative forms of plurality and
plural-making also open immanent potentials and consequential politics.

*Instructions: *
If you are interested in being a panelist, please email an abstract (<300
words) to Aliyah BD Dewar (aliyahbd at sas.upenn.edu) and Xiao Schutte Ke (
kxy at sas.upenn.edu) by *April 22nd*. If you have any questions or would be
interested in serving as a discussant, feel free to reach out as well.
All the best,

Xiao and Aliyah
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