Recent studies in linguistic anthropology have revealed that in speaking (and writing), speakers consciously and unconsciously employ discursive strategies to position, figure, or construct personal identities of themselves... [ view full abstract ]
Recent studies in linguistic anthropology have revealed that in speaking (and writing), speakers consciously and unconsciously employ discursive strategies to position, figure, or construct personal identities of themselves and others. Some of them in particular have analytically focused on how uses of language and other signs can produce such effects, closely examining the processes whereby linguistic tokens are associated with various objects of reference. Analyses of this process of linking and associating language with meanings meaningful across space and time have largely benefited from the application of the semiotic concept of the index, now familiar to semiotically informed linguistic anthropology and which was systematized by Charles Sanders Peirce as a part of his larger framework of sign-based epistemology and ontology.
In this panel, we extend this line of research and explore the various ways in which speakers in different contexts such as shops, village, and classrooms use language so as to achieve the pragmatic effect of communicatively aligning and/or semiotically figuring persons and personhoods—e.g., as one who acquired ‘modern’ taste (Kang), a child who ‘knows’ or is ‘adult-like’ (Ahn), are war evacuees (Kim), are ‘competitive’ neoliberal subjects (Choi), or ideal types of fashionable females (Koh). Literally taking into account the theme of “Crossing Borders,” we focus on the indexical use of language and highlight how language use links people and meanings that ‘cross’ space and time. Exposing the ways in which language or kinds of language are used to point to circulating images and models of persons and personal characteristics, this set of papers will show how individuals in communicative situations creatively embody and inhabit forms of personhood developed real-time through various methods of “pragmatic indexing” (Silverstein 2009).
References
Silverstein, Michael. 2009. "Pragmatic Indexing." In Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, Second Edition, edited by Jacob L. Mey, 756-759. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
