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List of contents
Preface
Orthography and Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Offer
3. Recruit
4. Repair
5. Resonate
6. Build
7. Living Assemblages
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Mark A. Sicoli is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Virginia, USA.
Summary
A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change.
This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.
Foreword
Presents a multimodal ethnography of language in the social life of a highland Zapotec community, with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic, and cultural, reproduction and change.
Additional text
This book is a tour de force. Through video-recorded examples from a Zapotec community, Sicoli shows beautifully how joint social action emerges in face-to-face interaction. Linguistic forms, gestures, positionings, and objects come together in multimodal assemblages that build on one another. Clearly, ethnographic studies of language in conversational interaction are enriched by his multimodal approach.
