How to Do Things With Words

Since the late 1980s, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline in the traditional sense, with a fixed set of research methods. The manifold roots of CDA lie in a myriad of disciplines including rhetoric, anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science, to name a few. This four-volume set brings together seminal articles on the subject from varied sources, creating an invaluable roadmap for scholars seeking to consolidate their knowledge of CDA, and of its continued development. Sculpted and edited by a leading voice in the field, this work covers the interdisciplinary roots, the most important approaches and methodologies of CDA, as well as applications in other disciplines in an updated and comprehensive way. Structured thematically, the four volumes cover a wide range of aspects and considerations: Volume One: Histories, Concepts and Interdisciplinarity Volume Two: Theoretical Approaches and Methodologies Volume Three: 'Doing CDA' - Case Studies Volume Four: Applications and Perspectives - New Trends in CDA

https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/18225/1/94pdf.pdf

Critical Discourse Analysis

Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding rela...

/pdf/manifesto-for-a-relational-sociology-jjhfxdfudt.pdf

Manifesto for a relational sociology

By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

"Referential Practice" is an anthropological study of language use in a contemporary Maya community. It examines the routine conversational practices in which Maya speakers make reference to themselves and to each other, to their immediate contexts, and to their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Oxkutzcab, Yucatan, William F. Hanks develops a sociocultural approach to reference in natural languages. The core of this approach lies in treating speech as a social engagement and reference as a practice through which actors orient themselves in the world. The conceptual framework derives from cultural anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive semantics. As his central case, Hanks undertakes a comprehensive analysis of deixis-linguistic forms that fix reference in context, such as English "I, you, this, that, here, " and "there." He shows that Maya deixis is a basic cultural construct linking language with body space, domestic space, agricultural and ritual practices, and other fields of social activity. Using this as a guide to ethnographic description, he discovers striking regularities in person reference and modes of participation, the role of perception in reference, and varieties of spatial orientation, including locative deixis. Traditionally considered a marginal area in linguistics and virtually untouched in the ethnographic literature, the study of referential deixis becomes in Hanks's treatment an innovative and revealing methodology. "Referential Practice" is the first full-length study of actual deictic use in a non-Western language, the first in-depth study of speech practice in Yucatec Maya culture, and the first detailed account of the relation between routine conversation, embodiment, and ritual discourse."

Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya

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]

discourse genres in a theory of practice

This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English this, that, here, and there whose meanings depend strictly on the occasions of their use. This paper critically examines current approaches to deixis, proposes an alternative framework based on the sociological concept of field, and applies this framework to deictic practice in Yucatec Maya. Drawing on the work of Buhler, Goffman, and Bourdieu, it adapts the field concept to the semiotic structure of deixis. The result is an analysis of deictic practice as an emergent construal of socially embedded deictic fields involving practical equivalences, counterpart relations among obje...

/pdf/explorations-in-the-deictic-field-h50bzi0518.pdf

Explorations in the Deictic Field

In recent years, the study of discourse has grown dramatically in anthropology and linguistics, generating a plethora of terms, concepts, and issues. A wide array of disciplinary orientations lies behind labels such as "text," "textuality," "discourse," "rhetoric," "narrative," and "poetic" (198). Here I focus on a limited range of issues in the organization and interpretation of text, working primarily with selected linguistic (34, 36, 54, 92, 118, 202), anthropological (17-20, 63a, 182, 188, 211), sociological (39, 76, 89, 90, 134), and critical (48, 73, 111, 123, 155, 161, 162, 205, 206) approaches. General overviews of these approaches, or collections of articles representative of them, can be found in the works just cited. Although research on text unavoidably touches on literacy and writing (38), language acquisition, education, and socialization (47, 89, 90, 153, 165), and political discourse and dispute (23, 29, 30), I do not address these topics directly in the following discussion. Rather, I concentrate on the status of text as sociocultural product and process, voicing in text, elements of textual organization, the relation of text to power in social contexts, some recent ethnographic studies of text, and certain further implications of this literature for social science. It is helpful by way of introduction to consider the relation between the two terms conjoined in the title. When used as a mass noun, as in "text is composed of interconnected sentences," text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users. As vague as such a definition is, already it commits us to a certain line of inquiry. The term "sign" raises issues of textual typology [iconic, indexical, and symbolic (59, 157, 170); dense, replete (77, 155)],

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2155887.pdf

Text and textuality

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.

William F. Hanks

Papers

Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya

discourse genres in a theory of practice

Explorations in the Deictic Field

Text and textuality

Pierre bourdieu and the practices of language