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"Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples - from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture"--
Sommario
List of Figures; Foreword; Preface; Introduction: Getting - and getting across - the message; Lecture 1: Text; Lecture 2: Event; Lecture 3: Context; Lecture 4: Enregisterment; Lecture 5: Variation; Lecture 6: Categoriality; Lecture 7: Relativity; Lecture 8: Knowledge; Editorial acknowledgments; References; Index.
Info autore
Michael Silverstein (1945–2020) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Chicago. His groundbreaking semiotic programme was shared with hundreds of students through his Language in Culture course, which he taught for almost fifty years and is distilled in this book. Silverstein was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1982 and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology in 2014. Dedicated to growing the field of linguistic anthropology, he was a president of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Communication and Society.
Riassunto
Showing how talk makes identities, categories and groups across time and space, Silverstein reveals how cultural knowledge is built discursively, stabilizing and changing both societies and politics. This book is for those who wish to understand how communication works, and how ways of talking enable social interaction, persuasion and coordination.
