Symbols and abbreviations Foreword John J. Gumperz Introduction to the reissue Notes 1. Introduction 2. Summarized argument 3. The argument: intuitive bases and derivative definitions 4. On the nature of the model 5. Realizations of politeness strategies in language 6. Derivative hypotheses 7. Sociological implications 8. Implications for language studies 9. Conclusions Notes References Author index Subject index.

Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage

How to Do Things With Words

People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person's perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self in the here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point-in time, in space, in social distance, and in hypotheticality-constitute different distance dimensions. Transcending the self in the here and now entails mental construal, and the farther removed an object is from direct experience, the higher (more abstract) the level of construal of that object. Supporting this analysis, research shows (a) that the various distances are cognitively related to each other, (b) that they similarly influence and are influenced by level of mental construal, and (c) that they similarly affect prediction, preference, and action.

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Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance

This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analy- sis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the cognitive interface of models. knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social represen- tations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argu- ment is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.

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Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

Preface I. On the Shoulders of Bakhtin and Vygotsky 1. The Woman Who Climbed Up the House 2. A Practice Theory of Self and Identity II. Placing Identity and Agency 3. Figured Worlds 4. Personal Stories in Alcoholics Anonymous 5. How Figured Worlds of Romance Become Desire III. Power and Privilege 6. Positional Identities 7. The Sexual Auction Block IV. The Space of Authoring 8. Authoring Selves 9. Mental Disorder, Identity, and Professional Discourse 10. Authoring Oneself as a Woman in Nepal V. Making Worlds 11. Play Worlds, Liberatory Worlds, and Fantasy Resources 12. Making Alternate Worlds in Nepal 13. Identity in Practice Notes References Credits Index

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Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

This paper describes childrearing practices, beliefs, and attitudes in a Papua New Guinea society - that of the Rossel Islanders - and shows, through analysis of interactions with infants and small children, how these are instantiated in everyday life. Drawing on data collected during research on Rossel Island spanning 14 years, including parental interviews, videotaped naturally-occurring interactions with babies and children, structured elicitations, and time sampling of activities involving children, we investigate the daily lives of Rossel children and consider how these influence their development of prosociality and their socialization into culturally shaped roles and characters. We relate the findings to other work on child socialization in small-scale societies, with special attention to the Tzeltal Maya of southern Mexico, and argue that detailed attention to the local socio-cultural contexts of childrearing is an important antidote to the tendency to emphasize universals of child development.

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Child rearing through social interaction on Rossel Island, PNG

This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verbal agreement inflections in children learning four different Mayan languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek. These languages have similar inflectional paradigms: they have a generally agglutinative morphology, with transitive verbs obligatorily marked with separate cross-referencing inflections for the two core arguments (‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive’). Verbs are also inflected for aspect and mood, and they carry a ‘status suffix’ which generally marks verb transitivity and mood. At a more detailed level, the four languages differ strikingly in the realization of cross-reference marking. For each language, we examined longitudinal language production data from two children at around 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6 years of age. We relate differences in the acquisition patterns of verbal morphology in the languages to (1) the placement of affixes, (2) phonological and prosodic prominence, (3) language-specific constraints on the various forms of the affixes, and (4) consistent vs. split ergativity, and conclude that prosodic salience accounts provide the best explanation for the acquisition patterns in these four languages.

The acquisition of agreement in four Mayan languages

Politeness and Impoliteness

Language is a highly integrated symbolic system; as cultural knowledge and behavior it is part of the automatized, taken-for-granted background of everyday life. The perspective from the language sciences therefore provides a contrast and a foil to the issues central to the culture debates among anthropologists. Language typologists do acknowledge certain phenomena that undermine their language-equals-cultural-group stance: for example, they recognize “language areas” where there is structural influence across unrelated languages in an intercommunicating area. The dominant perspective in cognitive science stresses the continuity between humans and other animals and views language as a biological phenomenon that maps in an unproblematical way onto perception, cognition, emotion, and social interaction. The relative frame of reference uses the speaker’s egocentric viewpoint to calculate spatial relations, as in the familiar left-right and front-back systems of European languages. The distinctive property of language is taken to be syntax, and the abstract core of syntax is a mental module that is universal and biologically innate.

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Penelope Brown

Papers

Child rearing through social interaction on Rossel Island, PNG

The acquisition of agreement in four Mayan languages

Politeness and Impoliteness

Language as a Model for Culture : Lessons from the Cognitive Sciences

Reprint of first chapter of (1987) Politeness: Some universals in language usage