Linguistic Anthropology: “Reading” the “Texts” of Social Interactions
Framing What We Do
In studying “the linkages between linguistic and social structures” linguistic
anthropologists take both very seriously as matters for theorization and empirical
investigation. These two “structures” turn out to be only indirectly related one to another
as structures, though each is ultimately unanalyzable without attention to the other.
On one side, linguistic structure manifests empirically in facts of discourse, which, to be
rendered into anything more than noise – for participants as well as for analysts – must be
rendered into texts-in-contexts under a theory of how instantiated grammatical form
(discourse parsed into text-sentences) and metrical (“poetic”) form (discourse parsed into
metrical principles of recurrent equivalences), ordinally vs. cardinally distributed
constituent units of larger forms, interact in achieving denotational textuality. Only under
such a double parsing does the phenomenon of indexicality – in social formations, always
conventional indexicality – make its face known, indexicality of the three discernible
kinds: cotextuality [text-internal principles of cohesion in principle independent of
grammar, e.g., parallelism, repetition, constituent ordering by “weight,” phonological and
semantic tropes, adjacency pair-part role alternation, etc.]; deixis [the indexical
component of denotation, where co(n)textualization and denotation intersect, e.g.,
‘person’al (communicative-role), locational, temporal, epistemic, logophoric deixis –
most of the “D” and “I” operators of DPs and IPs, etc.]; non-denotational social
indexicality [e.g., all “sociophonetic” indexicals, deference-and-demeanor indexicals
(“politeness” in the literature uninformed by social science), occupational and other
identity register-shibboleths, etc.] Texts gel in socio-spatio-temporal realtime, the
coming-into-being in other words of the distinction of ‘text’ and ‘context’, viewable as
the complementary processes of entextualization/contextualization; and the text vs.
context relationship, though always inherently subject to further transformation, becomes
thicker and more difficult to undo as determining of further interactional coherence as
already experienced cotext itself turns into “prior,” i.e., presupposable context for
participants in its co-construction. (Thus, the field of linguistics in its normative practice
imagines one-text-sentence-long texts as first adjacency pair-parts in asymptotically
vanishing presupposed context as its closest phenomenal object of investigation.)
On the other side, we recognize that discourse, functioning as the central medium of
social interaction, thus always instantiates recognizable cause-and-effect social events
(sometimes even linked essentially to imagined future ones, such as my act of composing
these lines in anticipation of the conference event, having seen the list of invited coparticipants). All discourse is thus always “perlocutionary,” if not always successfully
targetable in desired outcome according to “illocutionary” conventionality. But there are
normative genres that associate certain text-sentence-length formal ready-mades, e.g.,
explicit primary performative constructions with distinct metapragmatic lexical verbs (I
promise/order/etc. you that/to [S]), with certain adjacency pair-part expectations; and as
well various normative metricalizations otherwise characterizable that language users
recognize – and linguistic anthropologists come to know via ethnographic investigation –
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as relatively set genres of interactional textuality involving more than one participant,
e.g., “Getting-to-Know-You” or “Interrogation-of-a-Party-as-Good-Cop-Bad-Cop” in our
culture; “Why-I-Don’t-Have-A-Spirit-Power” among Northwest Native Americans of the
Plateau region, etc. In this way, all discursive occasions comprise the experienceable
social events of what social scientists term social organization, the processual
manifestation of social structures in experienceable and observable social practices; what
is revealed to systematic analysis is the way that people of particular positions within
structures of social differentiation in society are recruited to interactional roles with
certain understandings of how they may – note the normativity of the modal! – comport
themselves with respect to certain social others (think partitional or gradient structures of
age-set or age-grade; of kinship; of gender; of ethnicity; positional status within a firm or
like organization; of clan; of moiety; of profession; etc.). So social structures, like
linguistic structures, are only immanent in discourse-mediated social interaction,
indexically presumed upon and indexically – performatively – renewed (even potentially
transformed) in-and-by events of social interaction.
Depending on whether we examine individual discursive events as countable instances
under a theory of interactional genre, as do our “CA” brethren, who presume to extract
schemata of commonalty across what they take to be interactional sequences of
comparable type (same genre), or whether we study interdiscursive chains of
communication, longitudinally tracing the interactional behavior of people following
same or similar interactants, or interactants seemingly connected in a network of such, we
discover more and more encompassing social structures insofar we can discern normative
regularities with reference to which such events and chains of events are interpretable
with reference to a theory of group-relevant social differentiations.
People in societies not only reveal the immanence of social structural differentiations
relevant to their role-relational mutual coordination, they develop elaborate
metapragmatic intuitions about these indexically manifest relationships that bias their
own usage of linguistic forms and their interpretation of the usage of others. Frequently,
these intuitions are externalized in metapragmatic discourse in systems of valorization,
articulating value loadings of one or both of the indexically connected phenomena of
linguistic and social structure, i.e., language forms and social statuses, along dimensions
of evaluation, intuitions of ‘good’—‘bad’ or ‘better’—‘worse’ inherent in how these line
up. Indexicality is thus always a dialectical fact of language-in-use, duplex in character
(indexical by virtue of a metapragmatics; metapragmatically visible by virtue of form—
context reflexive consciousness) and thus inherently unstable. (And of course all
language-in-use is an exercise in indexicality “all the way down.”) Such ideological
loadings, then, drive change in time, as the cumulative bias of prescriptive or proscriptive
metapragmatic stipulation influences how people use linguistic form to be – or to avoid
being – persons of certain identifiable social types under certain social-contextual
conditions.
Current Horizons
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We have a fairly detailed idea of how the only apparently isolable facts of “what we say,”
i.e., the denotational text-in-context, comes to “count-as” [the illocutionary theorist’s
usage for ‘projects into’] “what we do” with words, one modality among all the cultural
semiotics we employ in discursive interaction to bring about cause-and-effect self- and
other-identification and social recognizability, “identity work,” on which rests how we
can coordinate with others as social agents. We have studies of many different kinds of
cultural schemata of valorized social differentiations indexed by particular language
features on social occasions of speaking, and elaborate studies of the cultural ideologies
in schemata of valorization that allow people to “read” each other in local cultural terms,
whether as to ethno-theories of intentionality framed as “motivation,” “affect/emotion,”
“calculative rationality,” etc.
One horizon of current investigation is implied in the term interdiscursivity, implying
multiple discretely experienced events of communication where commonalty of messages
and/or participants obtains: the circulation of indexically signaled values in groups and
across categories of people in society. Where do values ‘emanate’ from? (We have
detailed knowledge of explicit ritual contexts that reinforce values in relation to social
differences, of course, one of the centerpieces of social anthropology over the decades.
But how do particular sites of innovative usage come to set value that spreads across a
category of people, or in a group of people [not the same social thing, note!]?) Do acts of
communication in network chains follow institutionalized routes of circulation of
indexically signaled value? (Mass media need careful study for the way that mediatized
messages may be central to mediation of such indexically signaled values in complex,
mass social formations.) Do changes in indexically signaled values follow such routes?
Does this lead to realignments of identity as shibboleths emerge to new normativities of
usage? How does ideological discourse drive such change “from above” as a function of
its site(s) of emanation?
In matters of words and expressions – elements of denotational text in the first instance –
we already know of the multi-componential nature of the ‘meaning’ of anything we
might want to associate as the cued significance of use of a token of a word, of a
collocation, etc. Putnam’s philosophical arguments (concurrently and independently
reinforcing of my own work on indexicality) show us that all words and expressions in
parsable text are irreducibly indexical in character, under ‘the sociolinguistic division of
denotational labor’ indexing ultimately identities within schemata of social differentiation
(how a chemist uses the term water in disciplinarily contextualized discourse thus indexes
her identity as chemist – and may do so by the peculiarity of interdiscursive echoes of
such usage even when she is on the golf links). How do the group-relative and thus
identity-indexing stereotype concepts cued by word- and expression-usage interact –
sometimes in tension – with the grammatico-semantic concepts implied by the
distributional facts of form-class membership in grammatical structure? Do stereotypes
historically become grammatico-semantic projections? What does this possibility say
about the nature of grammatical normativity – as opposed to the irreducible indexicality
of all language-in-use – at least in respect of the internal structure of lexical classes
functioning in a grammar?
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Also, one of the key results of this indexical approach to language-in-use is – consistent
with what Labov discovered in regimes of fierce, institutionalized language
standardization – that as ideologically infused metapragmatic (un)consciousness of
indexicality engages with such indexicality, it defines not just individual punctate
indexicals (in variationism, an unexamined holdover from the notion of individual
Lautgesetze affecting a single phoneme or phonetic segment-type, now viewed as an
isolable “variable”), but in fact it stimulates the coming-into-being of registers of
variance, sets of coherent cooccurrences normative for particular contextual conditions of
language-in-use, some features of which are more salient than others, thus functioning as
performable shibboleths of the occurrence of the register as such. (Think of the Japanese,
Javanese, Tibetan, etc. phenomenon of ‘speech levels’; also Ferguson’s “sport’s
announcer talk,” or “baby talk” as registers defining indexically coherent vs. incoherent
usage.) Enregisterment is the basic condition of language, and anything we might want
to term a ‘language’ is, as an empirical reality, the logical union of all its occurring
registers at any socio-historical moment. What are the limits of enregisterment? How
are its shibboleths, highly salient indexicals that skew interpretation of everything else,
emergent from the dialectic of usage and ideology? How is ‘style’ really a phenomenon
of register, and not of individual indexically loaded variables? How, finally, are the
phenomena that Martinet first postulated of a linkage of variables in “push-pull” chains,
as much to be located in phenomena of enregisterment – with which a behavioral Gestalt
of a kind of stereotypic character can be linguistically and paralinguistically performed –
as they are in phenomena like cognitive-structural symmetry of phonological and other
categorial systems of grammar (which always seem to allow phonetic coincidence of
underlyingly distinct phonological units)?
These are a few of the horizons of investigation to which contemporary linguistic
anthropology has come.