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A bold, new approach to language that addresses the subtleties of cultural identity
Major figures in contemporary anthropology present a dialogic critique of ethnography. Moving beyond sociolinguistics and performance theory, and inspired by Bakhtin and by their own field experiences, the contributors revise notions of where culture actually resides. This pioneering effort integrates a concern for linguistic processes with interpretive approaches to culture. Culture and ethnography are located in social interaction. The collection contains dialogues that trace the entire course of ethnographic interpretation, from field research to publication. The authors explore an anthropology that actively acknowledges the dialogical nature of its own production. Chapters strike a balance between theory and practice and will also be of interest in cultural studies, literary criticism, linguistics, and philosophy. CONTRIBUTORS: Deborah Tannen, John Attinasi, Paul Friedrich, Billie Jean Isbell, Allan F. Burns, Jane H. Hill, Ruth Behar, Jean DeBernardi, R. P. McDermott, Henry Tylbor, Alton L. Becker, Bruce Mannheim, Dennis Tedlock
Code Switching, the alternating use of two or more languages ation, has become an increasingly topical and important field of research. Now available in paperback, Code-Switching in Conversation brings together contributions from a wide variety of sociolinguistics settings in which the phenomenon is observed. It addresses not only the structure and the function, but also the ideological values of such bilingual behaviour. The contributors question many views of code switching on the empirical basis of many European and non European contexts. By bringing together linguistics, anthropological and socio-psychological research, they move towards a more realistic conception of bilingual conversation action.
The oldest and most extensive written language of Southeast Asia is Old Javanese, or Kawi. It is the oldest language in terms of written records, and the most extensive in the number and variety of its texts. Javanese literature has taken many forms. At various times, prose stories, sung poetry or other metrical types, chronicles, scientific, legal, and philosophical treatises, prayers, chants, songs, and folklore were all written down. Yet relatively few texts are available in English. The unstudied texts remaining are an unexplored record of Javanese culture as well as a language still alive as a literary medium in Bali. Introduction to Old Javanese Language and Literature represents a fir...
"Metalanguage in Interaction" is about the crystallization of metalanguage employed throughout interaction into the discourse markers which permeate talk. Based on close analysis of naturally-occurring Hebrew conversation, it is a synchronic study of the grammaticization of discourse markers, a phenomenon until now mostly studied from a diachronic perspective. It constitutes the first monograph in the fields of Hebrew interactional linguistics and Hebrew discourse markers. The book first presents what is unique to the present approach to discourse markers and gives them an operational definition. Discourse markers are explored as a system, illuminating their patterning in terms of function, ...
In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux examines five influential theories of the reading process--those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich.
Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, Laine Berman shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the rigid constraints of an hierarchical social order. She does this by identifying the silences, the "unsaid", and by revealing both the structure and function of silence in terms of its indexical reference to local meaning. It is here that the force of the Javanese language as used in everyday interaction shows itself to be an extremely potent philosophical entity as well as a means of social control. Thus, at least in regard to the urban poor, the book boldly questions the difference between traditional definitions of Javanese elegance and oppression. This study will contribute to our understanding of the social consequences of language use, to the linguistic knowledge of Indonesia and Java, and to such basic linguistic issues as narrative structure and function, speech levels and styles, and indexicality features.
This book proposes the concept of "fictional contamination" to capture the fact that fictionalization and literary complexity can be found across different kinds of narrative. Exploring conversational storytelling in oral history and other interviews from socionarratological perspectives, the book systematically discusses key narrative features such as story templates, dialogue, double deixis, focalization or perspective-taking and mind representation as well as special narrative forms including second-person narration and narratives of vicarious experience. These features and forms attest to storytellers’ linguistic creativity and serve the function of involving listeners by making storie...
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