1 The scope of linguistic anthropology 1
1.1 Definitions 2
1.2 The study of linguistic practices 5
1.3 Linguistic anthropology and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences 10
1.3.1 Linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics 13
1.4 Theoretical concerns in contemporary linguistic anthropology 14
1.4.1 Performance 14
1.4.2 Indexicality 17
1.4.3 Participation 20
1.5 Conclusions 21
2 Theories of culture 23
2.1 Culture as distinct from nature 24
2.2 Culture as knowledge 27
2.2.1 Culture as socially distributed knowledge 30
2.3 Culture as communication 33
2.3.1 Lévi-Strauss and the semiotic approach 33
2.3.2 Clifford Geertz and the interpretive approach 36
2.3.3 The indexicality approach and metapragmatics 37
2.3.4 Metaphors as folk theories of the world 38
2.4 Culture as a system of mediation 39
2.5 Culture as a system of practices 43
2.6 Culture as a system of participation 46
2.7 Predicting and interpreting 47
2.8 Conclusions 49
3 Linguistic diversity 51
3.1 Language in culture:the Boasian tradition 52
3.1.1 Franz Boas and the use of native languages 52
3.1.2 Sapir and the search for languages' internal logic 56
3.1.3 Benjamin Lee Whorf.worldviews,and cryptotypes 57
3.2 Linguistic relativity 60
3.2.1 Language as objectification of the world:from von Humboldt to Cassirer 62
3.2.2 Language as a guide to the world:metaphors 64
3.2.3 Color terms and linguistic relativity 65
3.2.4 Language and science 67
3.3 Language,languages,and linguistic varieties 69
3.4 Linguistic repertoire 71
3.5 Speech communities,heteroglossia,and language ideologies 72
3.5.1 Speech community:from idealization to heteroglossia 72
3.5.2 Multilingualspeech communities 76
3.5.3 Definitions of speech community 79
3.6 Conclusions 83
4 Ethnographic methods 84
4.1 Ethnography 84
4.1.1 What is an ethnography? 85
4.1.1.1 Studying people in communities 88
4.1.2 Ethnographers as cultural mediators 91
4.1.3 How comprehensive should an ethnography be?Complementarity and collaboration in ethnographic research 95
4.2 Two kinds of field linguistics 98
4.3 Participant-observation 99
4.4 Interviews 102
4.4.1 The cultural ecology of interviews 103
4.4.2 Different kinds of interviews 106
4.5 Identifying and using the local language(s) 110
4.6 Writing interaction 113
4.6.1 Taking notes while recording 115
4.7 Electronic recording 116
4.7.1 Does the presence of the camera affect the interaction? 117
4.8 Goals and ethics of fieldwork 119
4.9 Conclusions 121
5 Transcription:from writing to digitized images 122
5.1 Writing 123
5.2 The word as a unit of analysis 126
5.2.1 The word as a unit of analysis in anthropological research 129
5.2.2 The word in historical linguistics 130
5.3 Beyond words 132
5.4 Standards of acceptability 134
5.5 Transcription formats and conventions 137
5.6 Visual representations other than writing 144
5.6.1 Representations of gestures 145
5.6.2 Representations of spatial organization and 148
participants'visual access 150
5.6.3 Integrating texts,drawings,and images 151
5.7 Translation 154
5.8 Non-native speakers as researchers 160
5.9 Summary 161
6 Meaning in Iinguistic forms 162
6.1 The formal method in linguistic analysis 162
6.2 Meaning as relations among signs 164
6.3 Some basic properties of linguistic sounds 166
6.3.1 The phoneme 168
6.3.2 Etic and emic in anthropology 172
6.4 Relationships of contiguity:from phonemes to morphemes 174
6.5 From morphology to the framing of events 178
6.5.1 Deep cases and hierarchies of features 181
6.5.2 Framing events through verbal morphology 188
6.5.3 The topicality hierarchy 191
6.5.4 Sentence types and the preferred argument structure 192
6.5.5 Transitivity in grammar and discourse 193
6.6 The acquisition of grammar in language socialization studies 197
6.7 Metalinguistic awareness:from denotational meaning to 198
pragmatics 199
6.7.1 The pragmatic meaning of pronouns 202
6.8 From symbols to indexes 204
6.8.1 Iconicity in languages 205
6.8.2 Indexes,shifters,and deictic terms 207
6.8.2.1 Indexical meaning and the linguistic construction of gender 209
6.8.2.2 Contextualization cues 211
6.9 Conclusions 213
7 Speaking as social action 214
7.1 Malinowski:language as action 215
7.2 Philosophical approaches to language as action 218
7.2.1 From Austin to Searle:speech acts as units of analysis 219
7.2.1.1 Indirect speech acts 226
7.3 Speech act theory and linguistic anthropology 227
7.3.1 Truth 229
7.3.2 Intentions 231
7.3.3 Local theory of person 233
7.4 Language games as units of analysis 236
7.5 Conclusions 243
8 Conversational exchanges 245
8.1 The sequential nature of conversational units 247
8.1.1 Adjacency pairs 250
8.2 The notion of preference 259
8.2.1 Repairs and corrections 261
8.2.2 The avoidance of psychological explanation 263
8.3 Conversation analysis and the "context" issue 264
8.3.1 The autonomous claim 267
8.3.2 The issue of relevance 271
8.4 The meaning of talk 275
8.5 Conclusions 277
9 Units of participation 280
9.1 The notion of activity in Vygotskian psychology 281
9.2 Speech events:from functions of speech to social units 284
9.2.1 Ethnographic studies of speech events 290
9.3 Participation 294
9.3.1 Participant structure 294
9.3.2 Participation frameworks 295
9.3.3 Participant frameworks 307
9.4 Authorship,intentionality,and the joint construction of interpretation 314
9.5 Participation in time and space:human bodies in the built environment 321
9.6 Conclusions 328
10 Conclusions 331
10.1 Language as the human condition 331
10.2 To have a language 332
10.3 Public and private language 334
10.4 Language in culture 336
10.5 Language in society 337
10.6 What kind of language? 338
Appendix:Practical tips on recording interaction 340
References 348
Name index 387
Subject index 393