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Meaning as a nonlinear effect The birth of cool
Abstract
Saussurean and Chomskyan “conduit” views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson’s view of systems infused with more recent linguistic-anthropological insights into the ideologically mediated and indexically organized “total linguistic fact”, this paper argues for a view of meaning in terms of complex open systems in which complex units of analysis invite more precise distinctions within “meaning”. Using online viral memes and the metapragmatic qualifier of “cool” as cases in point, we see that the meaning of such memes is better described as a range of “effects”, most of them nonlinear and not predictable on the basis of the features of the sign itself. The effects are generated by the “virality” of the sign, i.e. they reside in the rapid “sharing” practice itself. Such effects suggest a revised and broader notion of nonlinear “perlocution”.
... In fact, when people communicate, they perform a bundle of functions: epistemic, affective, poetic, performative (Hymes 1980;Haviland 1989;Bauman & Briggs 1990). And it is this bundlenot just its epistemic aspectthat turns communication into something that satisfies higher-order social and cultural demands (Hymes 1966(Hymes , 1996Silverstein 1985Silverstein , 1997Silverstein , 2004Blommaert 2006bBlommaert , 2015c. We convince others not just by the pureness and truth-conditional excellence of our argument, but even more by the stylistic-narrative performance in which it is cast and by the evaluative key in which we frame it; and we pay meticulous attention to all of this while we build our argument. ...
The general election of 2014 is considered a milestone in political history. Political Historians has compared the said election with 1957,1971 and 1984 general elections as it witnessed ‘majority’ governments. The noteworthy aspect of the 2014 general election is the extensive use of ICT based social media. ICT based social media allowed parliamentarians to reach out to individuals directly. Parties indulged in campaigning used highly cynical information & multimedia across social media platforms. Major national parties contesting for election used either misinformation or miss interpreted information to counter each other. The study focuses on the usage and application of rumours (unverified stories) through media as a tool to counter rival parties during the election campaign.
... The analysis also benefits from a deep understanding of Barthes' contribution to the field of semiotics by broadening it through the inclusion of other sign-systems such as images, nonverbal language, or even sounds. Additionally, operating on the assertion that internet memes can also be understood as identical to the semiotic sign (Blommaert 2015;Cannizzaro 2016), this analysis primarily draws on the work of Eco given his contributions to semiotics. As noted by Eco (1979) the "[d]etection of the speaker's world vision [or ideology] depends on a process of interpretation rather than on previous codes" (129). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic uniquely represents an unprecedented health crisis that has permeated all aspects of human society. Given the technological affordances of social media to disseminate fact-based as well as purposefully misinformed and/or conspiratorial information, this paper examines the serious and strategic messaging on Instagram posts tagged with #civilwar2. Results from a critical discourse analysis show that within modern American conspiratorial thinking and given the problematic politicization of COVID-19, healthy scepticism is replaced with conspiracy absent of theory. When extreme political and socio-cultural polarization occurs, this tendency is exacerbated by the bifurcation of meaning as expressed by those who seek to promote a particular angle of a given story or event. While this may be somewhat common in so-called old media, online in discursive spaces such as Instagram, the challenge to understand the mediated message is compounded by visual referents, which are often remixed to include adjunct information, such as mashups, hashtags, inserted text, or images, etc. Results include the identification of two main categories of Instagram memes tagged with #civilwar2. These categories are analysed following three primary characteristics of discourse: genre, discourse/representation, and style.
... Whereas the first two discourse topics in Part 1 of our analysis provided evidence of the coaches' orientation to dominant discourses of language separation and monolingual bias, our analysis in Part 2 suggests that translanguaging spaces are indeed 'a space where multilingual individuals integrate social spaces (and thus "language codes") that have been formerly practiced separately in different spaces by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment' (Hua, Wei, and Jankowicz-Pytel 2019, p.9). Employing the multilingual practices of MSA, Syrian Arabic and English for meaning-making and knowledge construction works as an act of resistance to the English-only policy but in doing the personal histories and shared identities of the beneficiaries are more able to come into contact with each other in this translanguaging space. Blommaert (2015) has pointed out that interactants employ their available resources to achieve their communication goals, and that limiting these resources in L2 context may limit the students' agency and the richness of interactions. The participants in the present study demonstrated a natural flow crossing language boundaries that did not appear completely new to them. ...
This paper investigates the linguistic and semiotic resources that NGO coaches draw on to create safe spaces in their English language lessons for psycho-social support in refugee settings. We do so by applying the rapidly developing concept of translanguaging, using data from a multi-site linguistic ethnography study in an NGO in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Interviews and classroom observations of six coaches were conducted in four different centres of the NGO across Erbil city. Detailed fieldnotes were recorded during the field visits and intensive observations of the translanguaging practices were made with follow-up interviews to ask about these practices. We analyse four discourse topics which are discussed through examples from the interviews and the video-recordings from the lessons. We argue that translanguaging spaces do not only create safe spaces but also generate new practices, while also providing opportunities to ensure positive identity and meaningful interaction within the English language classrooms we observed. The new practices in our data are the translanguaging practices which emerge every time the coaches and beneficiaries draw from their semiotic and linguistic repertoires. However, these were the outcome of unplanned translanguaging practices which were more often controlled by the coaches rather than the beneficiaries.
... They also tacitly followed the norm that the texts on Elder Biaoqing are to be understood literally. For instance, they took the "再见" (bye-bye) on the Elder Biaoqing as a polite greeting, instead of as an expression of contempt, dissatisfaction and irony, which is a result of nonlinear transformation (Blommaert, 2015) of the indexicality of "再见" on Chinese social media through the collective negotiation (or ethno-metapragmatics) of (young) people (Nie & Lu, 2018). This example is an instance of reflection on the characteristics of Elder Biaoqing. ...
This paper adopts a digital ethnographic approach to analyze concrete communicative practices with Elder Biaoqing (a type of graphic semiotic resources comparable to emojis and memes) on Chinese social media. Following Silverstein's theorizing, it reveals the emergence of multiple indexicalities of Elder Biaoqing that are a result of several social factors: the growth of an elder population online, people's reflections on their communicative needs engendered by specific social facts, and people's ethno-metapragmatics. The study of Elder Biaoqing reveals users' agency in creating semiotic resources, the inequality between digital natives and digital migrants, and the age anxiety in Chinese society. The findings invite a re-imagination of social facts-the existence of an online-offline nexus, and a rethinking of theories for sociocultural researches in a digital era-ontological perspectives on multimodal resources and digital infrastructures, developments of the theoretical perspective of indexicality, and a total-semiotic-fact approach to digitally-mediated social interaction.
... In the digital world, memes have the capability of proposing and debating an argument through visual and verbal interaction (Wiggins, 2019). Wiggins (2020) has established that to comprehend the visual composition and the discourse of the meme it is necessary to consider its semiotic composition, that is, how signs are observed, the way in which a meme is produced and communicated and how it is received by others (Blommaert, 2015). Colorado-Castellary (2010) has explained that memes are a new modality that is not limited to a global cultural network. ...
During the emergence of the novel COVID-19, a proliferation of memes related to events discussed in Spanish-speaking social media was observed. This study analysed the four stages of collective coping to determine how memes became triggered social representations that gradually monopolized the mainstream media. The research was performed through an electronic survey of 351 participants from Puerto Rico, which was subsequently analysed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The study's results reflected psychological implications in the use of memes in terms of how they were used to mitigate the stressful circumstances of a social event. This study is a pioneer in the application of Collective Coping Theory in the context of the effects that memes produce as a link to mitigate stressors. It also discusses how, when a culture faces a problem, memes become a decisive means to reinterpret the situation.
... Whereas the first two discourse topics in Part 1 of our analysis provided evidence of the coaches' orientation to dominant discourses of language separation and monolingual bias, our analysis in Part 2 suggests that translanguaging spaces are indeed 'a space where multilingual individuals integrate social spaces (and thus "language codes") that have been formerly practiced separately in different spaces by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment' (Hua, Wei, and Jankowicz-Pytel 2019, p.9). Employing the multilingual practices of MSA, Syrian Arabic and English for meaning-making and knowledge construction works as an act of resistance to the English-only policy but in doing the personal histories and shared identities of the beneficiaries are more able to come into contact with each other in this translanguaging space. Blommaert (2015) has pointed out that interactants employ their available resources to achieve their communication goals, and that limiting these resources in L2 context may limit the students' agency and the richness of interactions. The participants in the present study demonstrated a natural flow crossing language boundaries that did not appear completely new to them. ...
This paper explores language learning for displaced people in the countries bordering Syria and attempts to establish a link between the concept of translanguaging and the concept of safe spaces used by NGOs. The paper uses the term ‘displaced people’ as it is this feature of being dis -placed that the paper seeks to explore through the lens of superdiversity and its connections to spaces for translanguaging. The concept of superdiversity helps us understand the stratification and multiplication of the processes and effects of migration which lead to heightened complexity, while the concept of translanguaging has been incorporated into this heuristic to help understand how people communicate in these superdiverse settings. The main finding is that monolingual ideologies of language learning pervade the safe spaces which one NGO provides, though the aim is not to single out this one NGO for criticism when the majority of NGOs visited orient to similar monolingual outlooks which disregard home languages at a time when vulnerable adults, adolescents and children need to draw on all of the language resources in their repertoires to make sense of their new surroundings.
... In fact, when people communicate, they perform a bundle of functions: epistemic, affective, poetic, performative (Hymes 1980;Haviland 1989;Bauman and Briggs 1990). And it is this bundle -not just its epistemic aspect -that turns communication into something that satisfies higher-order social and cultural demands (Hymes 1966(Hymes , 1996Silverstein 1985Silverstein , 1997Silverstein , 2004Blommaert 2006bBlommaert , 2015c. We convince others not just by the pureness and truthconditional excellence of our argument, but even more by the stylistic-narrative performance in which it is cast and by the evaluative key in which we frame it; and we pay meticulous attention to all of this while we build our argument. ...
Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice.
Taking Émile Durkheim’s concept of the ‘social fact’ (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkheimian social world in which we currently live. This new social world operates 'offline' as well as 'online' and is characterized by 'vernacular globalization', Arjun Appadurai’s term to summarise the ways that larger processes of modernity are locally performed through new electronic media. Blommaert extrapolates from this rich concept to consider how our communication practices might offer a template for thinking about how we operate socially. Above all, he explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and social practice
In Durkheim and the Internet, Blommaert proposes new theories of social norms, social action, identity, social groups, integration, social structure and power, all of them animated by a deep understanding of language and social interaction. In drawing on Durkheim and other classical sociologists including Simmel and Goffman, this book is relevant to students and researchers working in sociolinguistics as well as offering a wealth of new insights to scholars in the fields of digital and online communications, social media, sociology, and digital anthropology
... While some social meaning or indexical relations can appear to be 'common sense' and become shared at macro-levels, social meaning relations are "amenable to being discussed, argued over and renegotiated metalinguistically" (Coupland 2007: 23). Thus, the social meanings that people attach to particular linguistic use, and which thereby inform people's evaluative practices, are best conceptualised as intersubjectively and locally (re)recreated as well as multi-dimensional, variable, unstable and context-dependent (e.g., Blommaert 2015;Coupland 2007). ...
[Published in August 2017] With reference to two recent doctoral research projects on ELF, the present article examines the characterisation of language attitudes as either stable or variable evaluative phenomena, and provides a detailed account of methodological practices that may be favoured from each ontological position. The durability of language attitudes is more specifically conceptualised as a stable (but not enduring) construct directed to a linguistic phenomenon in one thesis, and as variable and emergent forms of evaluative social practice around a language-related issue in the other. With these two different approaches in conversation, the authors consider the extent to which stability and variability of language attitudes may be two sides of the same coin, and question whether it is safe to assume a priori the inferability of stable language attitudes from the observation of evaluative practice. This article evidences the need for ELF researchers working in this area to contemplate what and how it is being researched in the name of language attitudes while having awareness of possible alternatives in any given study.
... Articulating a similar point, and viewing language and communication as a so- ciolinguistic system that operates through complex semiotic units, Blommaert (2015) adds that meaning is not linear but can yield several different effects. Thus taking these considerations -the transnational habitus of international students as they navigate a digitally saturated world -we posit that reflexivity can serve as a means to better understand the dilemmas of international university students in relation to wider social, cultural and economic changes. ...
Following Sayer’s (2010) examination of reflexivity and habitus, we focus on the transnational habitus (Darvin & Norton 2015) of Aaron, a Chinese international student at a U.S. university. Specifically, we examine how he wrestled with being identified as an ESL learner despite having attended a U.S. high school. Also exploring the relationship between reflexivity and emotions (Flam 2010), we draw on his written work, interviews, and his WeChat conversations. Our findings revealed that as a result of positioning himself as being better than the other Chinese students on campus (because of his English proficiency) and distancing himself from domestic U.S. students, Aaron did not capitalize on his Chinese-English bilingualism to extend his local social networks, which exacerbated his growing isolation at his home university. In tracing his emotional trajectory and strategies to cope with his predicament, we problematize the grand narrative of the global elite (Vandrick 2011) that overlooks the challenges encountered by affluent international students.
... The analyses are outstanding; but we should not overlook the fact that the online context is not well understood. We know that it has exceptional scalar qualities (think of virality), and that it stands in complex polycentric relationships to "offline" chronotopes (Blommaert 2015b;Varis & Blommaert 2015). But the exact characteristics of these phenomena await focused study. ...
Mobility raises specific issues with regard to what we understand by “context”, and in this commentary I suggest that Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope could be a useful instrument enabling a precise and detailed, mobile, unit of “context”. This unit connects specific timespace arrangements with ideological and moral orders, projecting possible and preferred identities. The papers in this issue offer rich material in this direction.
... Moreover, both are semiotic to the extent that informational use of English can convey symbolic connotations to certain readers, and vice versa. The meaning of English on a sign indeed remains 'a nonlinear effect', part of inherently complex and open systems (Blommaert 2016), and its meaning ultimately lies in the eye of the beholder. Whether producers (shop-owners or chain stores) or consumers (clientele or inhabitants) value English in commercial discourse as a vehicular lingua franca, a connotational selling strategy, or both, depends on the local linguistic market they form part of. ...
Globalization has dramatically altered the urban societies of Amsterdam and Brussels over recent decades, with intensified socio-economic inequality, unprecedented levels of multilingualism and the increasing importance of English. In this paper, I examine the use of English in the linguistic landscape of socio-economically stratified commercial shopping streets in these two second-tier global cities. I adopt a market-oriented, contextualized approach to quantitative and qualitative variability in how English emerges in these particular commercial ‘linguistic markets’. McDonaldization in midscale shopping streets occurs alongside downscale and upscale uses of English which are more susceptible to local commercial dynamics, in particular in Brussels. As such, global English in these single city contexts emerges as a heterogeneous and scaled phenomenon shaped by specific local commercial and linguistic market conditions. Globalisering heeft de stedelijke gemeenschappen van Amsterdam en Brussel drastisch veranderd tijdens de voorbije decennia met toegenomen socio-economische ongelijkheid, ongeziene gradaties van meertaligheid en een groter belang van het Engels. In dit artikel bekijk ik het gebruik van het Engels in het talige landschap van sociaal-gestratificeerde commerciële winkelstraten in deze twee secundaire wereldsteden. Ik hanteer een marktgeoriënteerd en gecontextualiseerd perspectief op de kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve verschillen in hoe Engels wordt gebruikt in deze specifieke commerciële ‘linguïstische markten’. McDonaldisering in middenklasse-winkelstraten komt voor naast hoger en lager gestratificeerd gebruik van het Engels dat vooral in Brussel meer onderhevig is aan lokale commerciële dynamieken. Op basis hiervan toont het lokale gebruik van het Engels zich als een heterogeen en geschaald fenomeen binnen één stad dat beïnvloed wordt door specifieke lokale commerciële en talige marktcondities.
... The classroom discussion continues in a similar manner until the end of the lesson. Just before the bell rings and the students move on to their next class, the teacher tells the students: constituting what is happening and how written language means, the total semiotic fact (cf., Blommaert, 2015Blommaert, , 2016. Our analysis of a brief excerpt from a classroom events not only illustrated how the linguistic and social turns are manifest in classroom literacy events, how any literacy event reflects and refracts what has gone before, but also how these philosophical turns manifest themselves in language ideologies, curriculum, and instruction. ...
... This kind of 'cool' is highly valued among the group members, and the Saab friends frequently use it to imply that they are different from the 'new rich' (baofahu , who are wealthy but without a taste) and the 'privileged' (tequan jieceng , who are powerful by abusing their power). Here "cool" is used as a meaning category, or a key of communication that can refer to commodities, people, language, appearances, events; it is an indexical category with considerable "emic" value in a very large range of communities (Blommaert, 2016). The Saab friends use the MV as a 'footnote' to the jargon term and see it as an accurate description of their shared persona. ...
This paper engages with the ways in which formal learning environments increasingly have to compete with informal ones, where such informal learning environments can be seen as penetrations from global ‘scapes’ into local conditions of circulation and uptake of semiotic resources. The study is based on close observation of a group of upwardly mobile Chinese consumers who have access to informal learning environments and acquire discourses to express their tastes in cultural goods. As effects of their access to the informal learning environments, the informants expand their identity repertoires and bind one space to another through their sociocultural practices. Such identity effects are the outcome of scaled forms of access to globally circulating semiotic resources whose indexical value needs to be enacted, renegotiated, and learned. In explaining the rescaling of the informants, access to informal global learning environments is as important as their access to advanced formal education, and the combination of such scaled resources informs their emergence as a globally recognizable middle class.
Comedy has long been analysed from a pragmatic perspective with the predictable conclusion that we laugh because one of the four Gricean maxims has been violated. However, the wording of Grice’s maxims is so loose and flexible that more or less any joke would violate one of his maxims and thus the ‘Cooperative Principle’. So, we are still left mediating the meta-pragmatic question of what it is that lies behind verbal incongruity that makes us actually laugh? This article analyses the notion of incongruity from a Peircean semiotic perspective and focuses exclusively on a selection of British comedy duo sketches whose humour is derived overwhelmingly from discursive, lexical and socio-phonetic incongruity. On the basis of classic British comedy due sketches at least, there is some mileage in perceiving incongruity as a semiotic misalignment or ‘indexical shock’ which subverts our basic social expectations by indexing non-presupposed contexts. We laugh because our verbal norms are not only challenged, but are turned upside down and torn apart. Moreover, we laugh because the social identities that the speech acts aim to index non-referentially often clash or conflict immediately with those of his or her interlocutor’s.
Resumen
El presente artículo busca describir y analizar, desde un enfoque multimodal (Kress y van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2005, 2009; Jewitt, 2009), las relaciones entre los marcadores del discurso (Martín Zorraquino y Portolés, 1999) y los memes (Knobel y Lankshear, 2005; Varis y Blommaert, 2015), a partir de una selección de memes que fueron compartidos en dos grupos de Whatsapp de estudiantes de dos escuelas secundarias de Buenos Aires. Para ilustrar esta relación, nos detendremos en el marcador ahre , marcador de gran frecuencia de uso en el habla de los estudiantes, con el fin de, en primer lugar, describir las funciones comunicativas que mantiene en los memes, y, en segundo lugar, indagar en qué medida este marcador desempeña solo una función discursiva verbal dentro del meme, o si se configura de manera autónoma como marcador-meme . Esta categoría novedosa y aporte de esta investigación nos permitirá evidenciar cómo un marcador oral puede constituirse en meme y, simultáneamente, cómo un meme puede funcionar como marcador en los intercambios en línea. Por último, discutiremos los resultados en torno al modal ontinuum (Tannen, 1982), y cómo los marcadores conversacionales en géneros digitales se inscriben como un recurso dentro del repertorio lingüístico de los estudiantes.
Following my observation of an increased prevalence of neon or neon-esque signs within high-end spaces of consumption, this paper seeks to theorise how such signs can function as vehicles for the circulation of neoliberal ideas, a key concept structuring the capitalist economies, whilst having effects for individuals who are sold a brand of cool capitalist consumption. I demonstrates how neoliberalism is semiotically realised both online and offline through examples of “language objects” consisting of neon signs found in cafes located in Hong Kong and Singapore, and their Instagram resemiotizations, focusingon dimensions of precarity and the entrepreneurial self. In doing so, I suggest that these signs are not merely aphorismic decor but a means to reproduce neoliberal ideology in both their medium and message when they stylise concepts of individual agency, success and the turning of everyday activities into “projects”. Instead of the transformation and success promised by these stances, these signs further obscure the social embeddedness of neoliberalism and resulting inequality.
Adopting a translanguaging perspective, this article examines interlocutors’ orientations to, and use of, multidialectal and multilingual practices during L2 Arabic conversations-for-learning beyond the classroom in a study abroad program. The study argues that participants’ translanguaging practices challenge monolingual ideologies and the program’s monodialectal policy of using only Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in institutional talk beyond the classroom. Audio-recorded dyadic interactions between L2 Arabic learners and their native speaker conversation partners show how multidialectal and multilingual practices can work as a valuable interactional resource that multilinguals draw upon for productive interactions to enhance meaning-making, identity negotiation, and knowledge construction. In addition, participants seem to give precedence to intersubjectivity over monodialectal and monolingual language policies through their use of these translanguaging practices.
Longitudinal ethnographic research in a superdiverse neighborhood in inner-city Antwerp (Belgium) shows that, in spite of continuously and rapidly changing demographic patterns, a relatively stable lingua franca has emerged, which I call “oecumenical Dutch”. Rather than one identifiable variety, oecumenical Dutch is best seen as a continuum of “accented” varieties of vernacular Dutch, ranging from minimal operational registers such as those of simple shopping routines to fully developed multigeneric and multimodal varieties. This lingua franca operates as an “infrastructure” in the neighborhood, and ensures relatively smooth modes of interaction at the level of conviviality. Conviviality, however, is not (as often suggested) a superficial level of social engagement; in the superdiverse neighborhood, conviviality provides elementary and critical levels of social cohesion and integration. The resources required for oecumenical Dutch are low-threshold, “demotic” ones, and newcomers quickly acquire sufficient levels of proficiency. The tremendous social importance of this lingua franca should not obscure the fact that oecumenical Dutch enables specific trajectories of integration – those of convivial community membership – but does not qualify as a resource for integration towards full citizenship.
The construction of dialogue in comics often involves both visual and graphic considerations, with changes to the shape, size, font, colour, and even orientation of text and speech bubbles used to establish characters’ identities and voices in the medium. However, while many styles of graphic manipulation in comic dialogue have been discussed and researched to date, the variant use of script has seen little attention. In this study, I examine if and how locally variant uses of the Japanese hiragana, katakana and kanji scripts are used to index information about speakers and speech acts in three series of Japanese manga (comics). The findings show that marked selections of each script are used to index specific effects and social voices, with the interplay between script choice and the surrounding visuals often working together to establish information in the analysed texts.
en This paper examines the role of script selection in indexing identities and styles of self‐presentation within a Japanese manga (comic). By cataloguing where the kanji, hiragana, and katakana scripts are used to represent first person pronouns, I establish the contexts where each script/pronoun combination serves as a locally normative representation. These norms are compared against non‐normative representations to gain insight into the local meanings associated with the various scripts. Analysis of the variant forms is combined with an interview with the manga's author. Ultimately, the results reveal that the contribution of script to the meaning of a Japanese text goes beyond any single marked selection, and involves interactions between both locally normative patterns of script use and meaningful local violations of these norms. Selections of script are seen to convey nuances in how meaning is constructed in the text, as well as reflecting wider ideologies about language use in Japan.
Abstract
ja 本研究では日本の漫画を一作品取り上げ、文字表記方法によって登場人物のアイデンティティや表現スタイルがどのように構築されるかを考察する。登場人物の一人称代名詞が日本語の最も一般的な表記文字(漢字、ひらがな、カタカナ)のうちどの文字で著されているかを調査し、それぞれの表記がどのような文脈で用いられているかを分析することにより、文字表記の選択をもたらす、あるいは影響する動機を明らかにしようとする。この結果により日本語の文字表記の選択はテキストの意味において複雑で、且つ相互的な影響力を持つことが分かる。文字表記による意味は、ある一場面でどの文字が使われているかという個別の選択によって決まるものではなく、作品全体の中で見られる一貫したパターン(また、そのパターンからの例外的な逸脱)との関係で構築されるのである。これまでの先行研究では社会言語学的な見方で日本語の文字表記バリエーションについて多くは論じられていないが、本論文では、日本語の文字表記の選択は意味作成やニュアンスにおいて重要であり、また、日本でダイアローグ作成に影響する言語思想(イデオロギー)を観察するためのツールであることを明確化する。 [Japanese]
This dissertation examines emerging trends in networked politics through an analysis of the rhetorical forms and functions of internet memes as a unique response to the increasing force of technocratic rhetorics. Frequently dismissed as mere trivialities of networked discourses, memes have increasingly been mobilized to articulate new positions and structures of feeling around the significant issues of the day. As new iterations of memes are rapidly developed and circulated across networked public spheres, these rhetorical technologies provide new opportunities for amateur participation in the development of symbolic content. Such participation is particularly important as the intensification of control society has enabled technocrats to increasingly govern and narrow the domains of more traditional political rhetorics.^ Drawing a synthesis between Bernard Stiegler’s focus on the importance of technics and the rhetorical concepts, methods, and orientations of Kenneth Burke, I argue that digital memes – particularly the image macro – are an exemplar of the rhetorical affordances and constraints that define the politics of subjectification that drive networked publicity. Through the analysis of three controversies where technocratic and memetic rhetoric developed in tension with one another, I argue that through their sophistic politics of play memes promote a multitudinous mode of individuation that makes them particularly apt resources for the uncoiling and resistance of control. Specifically, these amateur dominated technics built meta-narratives that disrupt bureaucratization, remediate terms to destabilize anti-rhetorics, and disrupt national memories through their cosmopolitan tendencies. Combined these features lead to the conclusion that memes themselves to function as a rhetorical critic par excellence in networked rhetorics, fostering a politics of care particularly suited to disrupting the proletarianizing force of technocratic rhetorics.
There are forms of scientific activity that are rarely practiced by sociolinguists, and one of them is the self-conscious construction of theory. Sociolinguists appear to share a self-perception of staunchly empirical analysts devoted to the rigorous empirical exploration of sociolinguistic details and the patterns in which they can be understood. In such exercises, new theoretical constructs, concepts and categories can be, and frequently are being, developed; but generally such constructs, concepts and categories are presented as valid within sociolinguistics only – their extrapolation towards more widely relevant social theory usually being left to others. The lead assumption in this essay is that sociolinguists are a specialized type of sociologist, who observe society through the lens of language and interaction. The latter is a sui generis sociological object with an unmatched immediacy and accuracy as to empirically gauging the dynamics of social life: any social event and environment is characterized by patterns of interaction that are specific to it, and changes in such environments are observable in interactional behavior long before they show up in statistics. In that sense, I see contemporary advanced sociolinguistics as an empirical fact-checker for other social sciences and humanities, and as a rich source of innovative, empirically grounded hypotheses (in other words, theories) of general relevance. I shall offer two illustrations of the potential of contemporary sociolinguistics as a source for new theoretical directions in social science at large. First, I shall show how ongoing sociolinguistic research can shed new light on an old and persistent conceptual problem in sociology: that of delineating and defining social groups. The second proposal is related: in mainstream sociology (especially in the Durkheim-Parsons tradition), social integration is seen as crucial for understanding the development of societies and of social groups within them. Both the conceptualization of social groups and that of social integration can be significantly enhanced by drawing on recent insights from the sociolinguistic study of the online-offline interface.
This paper focuses on the structure of mediatized discourses on the former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis, which are labeled Varoufakiology. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of cartoons and photographs, which have been collected systematically in social and mainstream media through hypermedia ethnography, it is argued that neolectal stylistic features, including body posture, clothing and negotiation style are the emerging themes that prevail in mediatized communication with and about Varoufakis. In unison, they create a sense of semiotic vernacularization, translated into interacting linguistic and semiotic simplification, boldness and unconventionality associated with a controversial and multidimensional personality with intense and impactful political, academic and popular activity. In this sense, the overall argument put forward is that this mediatized vernacularization is not only a linguistic but also a widely semiotic type of communication, which reframes and positions Varoufakis as a political leader brought to light through controversial aspects of his identity, leadership and politics.
"Il y a eu une telle fertilisation réciproque des idées de la sémiotique de Saussure, centrée sur le code et le langage, et de la sémiotique inspirée par Peirce, qui est pragmatique et interprétative, qu'il est difficile de trouver aujourd'hui un sémioticien qui ne croit pas à la nécessité de développer une socio-sémiotique, interprétative et pragmatique ».
S'il fallait donner l'illustration de cette conception ouverte des avancées en sémiotique, l'ouvrage de Gunther Kress et Théo van Leeuwen : Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design, en serait
la meilleure preuve.
An extended case study on Tanzania highlighting the latest theoretical and methodological approaches in sociolinguistics. Tanzania is often seen as an exceptional case of successful language planning in Africa, with Swahili being spread to all corners of the country. Yet, this objective success has always been accompanied by a culture of complaints proclaiming its utter failure. State Ideology and Language in Tanzania sets out to explore this paradox through a richly documented historical, sociolinguistic and anthropological approach covering the story of Swahili from the early days of independence until today. Focusing on the ways in which Swahili was swept up in the 'Ujamaa revolution' - the transition to socialism led by president Nyerere - Jan Blommaert demonstrates how the language became an emblem not just of the Tanzanian 'cultural' nation, but above all of the 'political' nation. Using Swahili meant the acceptance of socialism, and the spread of Swahili across the country should equal the spread of Ujamaa socialism. When this did not happen, the verdict of failure was proclaimed on Swahili, which did not prevent the language from becoming one of the most widely used and dynamic languages on the continent. This book is a thoroughly revised version of the 1999 edition, which was welcomed at the time as a classic. It now extends the period of coverage to 2012 and includes an entirely new chapter on current developments, making this updated edition an essential read for students and scholars in language, linguistics and African Studies.
Summer 2021 Humor Webinar (sponsored by the International Society for Humor Studies [ISHS]): http://www.humorstudies.org/
June 18, 2021: Humor as a Personality Characteristic (Presenters & Panelists Jennifer Hofmann j.hofmann@psychologie.uzh.ch , Tracey Platt, Willibald Ruch, Sonja Heintz, Konstantine Edelmann, René Proyer, and Kay Brauer)
This Webinar is sponsored by the International Society for Humor Studies. Please check out the following link: http://www.humorstudies.org/ .
On another note, Alleen and Don Nilsen’s The Language of Humor (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is hot off the press. We have developed a PowerPoint to accompany each of the twenty-five chapters of the book as follows:
Chapter 1: Introduction & Humor Theories
Chapter 2: Humor in Anthropology & Ethnic Studies
Chapter 3: Humor in Art
Chapter 4: Humor in Business
Chapter 5: Humor in Computer Science
Chapter 6: Humor in Education
Chapter 7: Humor in Gender Studies
Chapter 8a: Humor in Geography I (International Humor: Books, Conferences and Organizations)
Chapter 8b: Humor in Geography II (International Humor: Examples and Discussion)
Chapter 9: Humor in Gerontology
Chapter 10: Humor in History
Chapter 11: Humor in Journalism
Chapter 12: Humor in Law
Chapter 13: Humor in Linguistics
Chapter 14: Humor in Literature
Chapter 15: Humor in Medicine and Health
Chapter 16: Humor in Music
Chapter 17: Humor in Names and Naming
Chapter 18: Humor in the Performing Arts
Chapter 19: Humor in Philosophy
Chapter 20: Humor in Physical Education
Chapter 21: Humor in Politics
Chapter 22: Humor in Psychology
Chapter 23: Humor in Religion
Chapter 24: Humor in Rhetoric and Composition
Chapter 25: Humor in Sociology
We’re sending you a PowerPoint indicating how humor is important to your particular discipline. Please let us know if you would like to receive any of our other humor-related PowerPoints (see above). Thanks. Don and Alleen Nilsen don.nilsen@asu.edu alleen.nilsen@asu.edu .
Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.
Human language has changed in the age of globalization: No longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality.
When analyzed in multilingual contexts, English is often treated as an entity that is separable from its linguistic environment. It is often the case, however, that multilinguals use English in hybrid and transcultural ways. This book explores how multilingual East Africans make use of English as a local resource in their everyday practices by examining a range of domains, including workplace conversation, beauty pageants, hip hop and advertising. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality, the author uses discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to demonstrate the range of linguistic and cultural hybridity found across these domains, and to consider the constraints on hybridity in each context. By focusing on the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found, the book illustrates how multilinguals respond to the tension between local identification and dominant conceptualizations of English as a language for global communication.
Le "Cours" de Saussure constitue un ouvrage clé pour quiconque s'intéresse au langage et aux langues ; il est considéré comme fondateur de la linguistique moderne. C'est là que se trouvent exprimés pour la première fois certains des concepts les plus féconds de la linguistique : oppositions binaires (langue/parole, signifiant/signifié, synchronie/diachronie), arbitraire du signe. Ces concepts seront largement affinés ou contestés, et nourriront la réflexion de générations de linguistes. Avec la reproduction de l'édition originale de 1916 établie par les élèves de Saussure d'après leurs notes, le lecteur trouvera un appareil critique complet dû à Tullio de Mauro, dont une biographie de Saussure et des notes. Les commentaires sont particulièrement instructifs, car ils font apparaître les violentes critiques qui ont suivi la publication du "Cours", ainsi que l'influence considérable qu'il a exercée et continue d'exercer. Ce livre peut être lu sans connaissances préalables en linguistique. "–Guillaume Segerer"
Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality. • There is great interest in the issue of globalization and this book will appeal to scholars and students in linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and anthropology • Richly illustrated with examples from around the globe • Presents a profound revision of sociolinguistic work in the area of linguistic communication
Through micro-analysis of language use, this book chronicles young women's pathways to becoming a Tanzanian beauty queen, offering an original perspective on the intersection of language with globalization, nationalism, and inequality in urban East Africa. This compelling linguistic ethnography considers the real-life effects, both on-and off-stage, of language policy, education, and gender dynamics for the women competing in the pageants. While highlighting many contestants' struggles for escape from poverty and patriarchy, the book also emphasizes their creative strategies linguistic and other wise for bettering their lives and shows how people living in a global economic periphery take part in, and sometimes feel left out of, the wider world.
This chapter highlights that for contemporary Modern English, the structural category of gender fits into an expected and universal typology of categories of noun phrases. It is one from among the set of different but consistent ways that certain semantic configurations are expressible in language form. The traditional grammatical category of gender, or gender classes of noun phrases, for example, is a formal distinction from the analytic perspective of reference and predication. In fluidly stratified societies in particular, Labov and others have discovered robust results of just this sort of statistical variability. Feminist theory of language, and its analysis and prescription for linguistic reform, seems correctly and accurately to perceive the pragmatic metaphorical relationship between gender identity and status, though much is cast into the rhetoric of power in a more abstract and less culturally situated form. The linguistic change to be considered has resulted in the contemporary configuration of a different aspect of the structure of Modern English, that of so-called person and number.
The English language is spreading across the world, and so too is hip-hop culture: both are being altered, developed, reinterpreted, reclaimed. This timely book explores the relationship between global Englishes (the spread and use of diverse forms of English within processes of globalization) and transcultural flows (the movements, changes and reuses of cultural forms in disparate contexts). This wide-ranging study focuses on the ways English is embedded in other linguistic contexts, including those of East Asia, Australia, West Africa and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on transgressive and performative theory, Pennycook looks at how global Englishes, transcultural flows and pedagogy are interconnected in ways that oblige us to rethink language and culture within the contemporary world. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows is a valuable resource to applied linguists, sociolinguists, and students on cultural studies, English language studies, TEFL and TESOL courses.
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action; it is also an effective tool with which we formulate models of social life and conduct. These models - or particular forms of social behaviour - are linked to the classification of 'types' of action or actor, and are passed 'reflexively' from person to person, and from generation to generation. Providing a unified way of accounting for a variety of social phenomena, this book will be welcomed by all those interested in the interaction between language, culture, and society.
Historical linguistic phenomena attest to plurilingual social formations at the intersection of two or more language communities, as do the emergence in many places of jargons, pidgins, and creoles. From such evidence in local language communities that have survived at the peripheries of imperial and currently globalizing projects, scholars projectively reconstruct the nature of such plurilingual social formations – speech communities with complex communicative economies. Counter to now centuries of ideologically informed Enlightenment dogmas policing and shaping language as a cultural object in the West, contemporary sociolinguistics finds that such phenomena that have emerged in the investigation of peripheral local language communities have now gone mainstream at the metropole.
This book examines the ways in which English is conceptualised as a global language in Japan, and considers how the resultant language ideologies - drawn in part from universal discourses; in part from context-specific trends in social history - inform the relationships that people in Japan have towards the language. The book analyses the specific nature of the language's symbolic meaning in Japan, and how this meaning is expressed and negotiated in society. It also discusses how the ideologies of English that exist in Japan might have implications for the more general concept of 'English as a global language'. To this end it considers the question of what constitutes a 'global' language, and how, if at all, a balance can be struck between the universal and the historically-contingent when it comes to formulating a theory of English within the world.
This engaging 2005 introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). It covers topics such as text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity. Blommaert focuses on how language can offer a crucial understanding of wider aspects of power relations, arguing that critical discourse analysis should specifically be an analysis of the 'effects' of power, what power does to people, groups and societies, and how this impact comes about. Clearly argued, this concise introduction will be welcomed by students and researchers in a variety of disciplines involved in the study of discourse, including linguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language.
Verbal interaction is related to the task at hand. Language and other social practices are interdependent. Not all students of language use and social interaction, however, will concede that ethnographic material, participant attributes, and patterns of social organization that are constitutive of talk need to be included in studies of conversation or discourse. The researcher can exercise considerable discretion in what the reader will be shown or told about "context." In the present paper, I discuss two senses of "context" as it involves conversational interaction in a bureaucratic environment. This use of the term "context" includes an institutionalized framing of activities or ways that group-derived prescriptive norms pressure and/or channel people with designated titles, presumed competencies, duties or responsibilities into certain physical spaces at certain times in order to engage in a finite number of specifiable activities. Within this institutionalized context or framing of activities, emergent processes of talk appear that creates a more narrow view of "context" in the sense of locally organized and negotiated interaction. I have chosen a conversation between three physicians in a university medical center to underscore the importance of context at different levels of analysis. The analyst's decision to focus on particular sociolinguistic notions rather than the interrelationship between discourse and broader and narrow senses of social structure will frame different expectations for the reader and different substantive conclusions on the part of the researcher.
Part I. A Theory of Speech Acts: 1. Methods and scope 2. Expressions, meaning and speech acts 3. The structure of illocutionary acts 4. Reference as a speech act 5. Predication Part II. Some Applications of the Theory: 6. Three fallacies in contemporary philosophy 7. Problems of reference 8. Deriving 'ought' from 'is' Index.
This article will demonstrate how the notion of 'phatic communion' has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking profiles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of 'individualization' and 'network sociality', alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and 'connected presence' has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture.
▪ Abstract An emergent focus of linguistic anthropological research is discernible in the investigation of the causes and consequences of contact of local language communities with forces of the wider polities in which they have become incorporated. This focus can be sketched by surveying a number of its component conceptual approaches, such as anthropological linguistics, ethnography of communication, variationist sociolinguistics, and the sociology and politics of languages. Its consideration of language as a total cultural fact is outlined by reference to studies that differentially emphasize language structure, entextualization/contextualization of language, and language ideology.
The concept of indexical order is introduced, necessary to any empirical investigation of the inherently dialectical facts of indexicality. Indexical order is central to analyzing how semiotic agents access macro-sociological plane categories and concepts as values in the indexable realm of the micro-contextual. Through such access their relational identities are presupposed and creatively (trans)formed in interaction. We work through several classic examples of indexicality well-known in the literature of sociolinguistics, the clarification of which can be enhanced by using the concept of indexical order, viz., ‘T/V’ deference-indexicality, speech levels, indexically significant variation in phonetics informed by a standard phonological register. We conclude with an analysis of identity-commoditizing indexical overlays such as the American English register here dubbed “oinoglossia,” ‘wine talk’.
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This study asserts that conscious development of new ways of thinking about language had a crucial role in modern history, particularly the discovery of how differences between languages legitimated social inequalities. it claims that savages and ancients were judged alike because they used language similarly, in contrast to modern Europeans who used disciplined language in scientific, philosophical and legal projects. © Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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