Bambi B. Schieffelin

Language has a heart

In the past several years, the social sciences have been articulating how emotion impacts cognition and social action. Linguists have underestimated the extent to which grammatical and discourse structures serve affective ends. A cross-linguistic analysis indicates that languages dedicate phonological, morpho-syntactic and discourse features to intensify and specify attitudes, moods, feelings and dispositions. These features provide an affective frame for propositions encoded. Suchframes can be consideredas pari of the Information expressed, äs affective comments on the expressed propositions they address. These comments Interface with gestural cues to provide interlocutors with critical Information on which to base subsequent social actions.

Talking Text and Talking Back: ''My BFF Jill'' from Boob Tube to YouTube

Exploring the close relationship between poetic language and metalanguage, this article analyzes both a series of 2007-8 U.S. TV ads that humorously deploy the language of text messaging, and the subsequent debates about the linguistic status of texting that they occasioned. We explore the ambivalence of commercials that at once resonate with fears of messaging slang as a verbal contagion and luxuriate in the playful inversion of standard language hierarchies. The commercials were invoked by monologic mainstream media as evidence of language decay, but their circulation on YouTube invited dialogic metalinguistic discussions, in which young people and texting proponents could share the floor with adults and language prescriptivists. We examine some of the themes that emerge in the commentary YouTubers have posted about these ads, and discuss the style of that commentary as itself significant.

Marking time: The dichotomizing discourse of multiple temporalities

Among the first linguistic innovations during early colonization/missionization in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, was the introduction of vocabularies and discourses of marking and keeping various types of Europeanbased time. The introduction of Europeanstyle institutionally organized activities in which participation was regimented and monitoredfor example, paid and unpaid labor schemes, schools, and churchesin the early 1970s gave rise to new ways of dividing days, weeks, months, and years based on linguistic innovations in Kaluli and Tok Pisin. Individuals who aligned themselves with mission organizations referred to these new economies of time, using particular expressions to differentiate themselves and their activities from those who were not similarly positioned. Simultaneously, new genres such as literacy lessons and sermons delineated time in terms of oppositional dichotomies that were temporally less specific but nonetheless linked to notions of social differentiation based on affiliation with a Christian community and/or identification with a nationstate. While lessons focused on oppositions between a past and a present, sermons related current actions and attitudes to future consequences and possibilities, both positive and negative. Both genres targeted attachments to past ideas and practices as obstacles to belief and conversion. Bosavi people played an active role in changing time; while maintaining the vernacular, they nonetheless changed critical cultural meanings.

Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea

Highlighting the language ideologies and speech practices critical to missionization, this paper examines the introduction of evangelical Christianity in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, and its uptake in local communities. It analyzes the mission’s linguistic and cultural ideologies—valorization of the vernacular language, rejection of cultural practices—and the consequences of these opposing valences. It details Bosavi pastors’ mediation and transmission of these ideologies through their translating practices, showing how local interpretations produced innovation in linguistic categories and transformation of cultural repertoires. I argue that this perspective contributes to continuity and discontinuity debates in the anthropology of Christianity. This paper also details how this mission’s tropes of division and separation and oppositional binaries when translated in Bosavi provided the linguistic categories that guided Bosavi Christians in reshaping the moral geographies of their communities. Finally, it addresses related shifts in the local significance of place and emplaced experiences more broadly, what I call “dis-placement,” the result of mission initiatives carried out by local pastors through which relationships between persons, activities, memory, and place become transformed and lose their meaning.

Language, Culture, and Society: The impact of language socialization on grammatical development

An offer 1 Thearchitectureofgrammaticaldevelopmentinthetalkofyoungchildrenisthe central concern of language acquisition research. The critical task of language acquisition scholarship over the last several decades has been to account for when, how, and why children use and understand grammatical forms over the course of the early period of their lives. Language socialization ‐ the process in whichchildrenaresocializedboththroughlanguageandtouselanguagewithin a community (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a, b) ‐ has been largely examined without regard to the dynamics of grammatical development, focusing, rather, on culturally relevant communicative practices and activities. 2 In this discussion, we reverse this orientation and focus directly on theroleoflanguagesocializationintheacquisitionofgrammaticalcompetence. What can a language socialization perspective offer to scholarship on grammatical development? A language socialization perspective yields a more sophisticated model of grammatical development, that is, one tuned into certain cultural realities that influence when, how, and why young children use and understand grammatical forms. Such a model of grammatical development takes an informed look at ideology and social order as forces that organize children’suseandcomprehensionofgrammaticalforms.Alanguagesocialization enriched model decries reductionistic visions that view the sociocultural context as “input” to be quantified and correlated with children’s grammatical patterns. Rather than reducing the context of grammatical development to frequencies of grammatical forms in the child’s linguistic environment, our socialization enriched model accounts for children’s grammatical development in terms of the indexical meanings of grammatical forms. This approach rests on the assumption that, in every community, grammatical forms are inextricably tied to, and hence index, culturally organized situations of use and that the 1 Our thanks to Lois Bloom, Patrick Gonzalez and Brian MacWhinney for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. An earlier version of this paper was published under the title “The Impact of Language Socialization on Grammatical Development”, in P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 73‐94. 2 ForreviewsofrecenttrendsinlanguagesocializationresearchseeGarrettandBaquedano-Lopez

The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Language as a resource for social theory 3. Kaluli children: ideology and everyday life 4. A la ma as a socialising practice 5. Socialisation of appeal and the ada: relationship 6. Socialising reciprocity and creating relationships 7. The development of childrens requests 8. The socialisation of gender appropriate behaviours 9. Conclusion Appendix Notes Glossary of Kaluli terms References Index.