In order to analyze language use within a theory of social practice, it is necessary to develop a coherent approach to speech genres. This paper contributes to such an approach, by treating genres as elements of linguistic habitus, consisting of stylistic, thematic, and indexical schemata on which actors improvise in the course of linguistic production. The empirical focus is “official” Maya language documents produced in 16th‐century colonial Yucatan. The rise of novel discourse genres in colonial society was part of the emergence of new, hybrid forms of action. [Mesoamerica, Maya, discourse analysis, social practice]
This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.
IndexicalityT he term indexicality refers to the pervasive context-dependency of natural language utterances, including such varied phenomena as regional accent (indexing speaker's identity), indicators of verbal etiquette (marking deference and demeanor), the referential use of pronouns (I, you, we, he, etc.)/ demonstratives (this, that), deictic adverbs (here, there, now, then), and tense. In all of these cases, the interpretation of the indexical form depends strictly on the context in which it is uttered. To say that any linguistic form is "indexical" is to say that it stands for its object neither by resemblance to it, nor by sheer convention, but by contiguity with it. As Charles Peirce put it, an indexical sign stands in a relation of "dynamical coexistence" with its object. In other words, the indexical and what it stands for are in a sense copresent in the context of utterance.Despite the broad scope of indexicality, the most familiar examples are natural language pronouns and deictics. If I utter "I want you to have this" while handing over a book to Madeleine, the forms "I, you, this" are indexical because they must be interpreted in relation to the situation of utterance. Thus the identical utterance form, if spoken in another situation, could pick out a different speaker and addressee, as well as a different object. Moreover, because indexicals encode little or no description of their referents, a form like "this" could as well be used to refer to a physical thing, an event ("this conference"), a period of time ("this Thursday")/ or a place ("this is where I live"). In short, there is no inherent property of thisness, thatness, hereness or thereness that an object must display in order to be appropriately denoted by the corresponding indexicals. Instead, what indexicals encode are the relations between objects and contexts (e.g., proximal, distal, speaker, addressee, simultaneous, antecedent). It is this link to context that secures uniqueness of reference even without description. Part of what makes this possible is the directive function of indexicals, whereby they direct an addressee to look, listen or take an object in hand. Similarly, the close association between indexicals and gestures (pointing, showing, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1-2):124~126.
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