Luke Fleming

Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity

Cross-culturally personal names are frequently avoided to the point of being taboo. The paper seeks to give a semiotically grounded analysis of why names in particular are so often taboo, and in so doing attempts to shed light on the species of performativity which undergirds the unmentionability of verbal taboos. From the avoidance of names in second-person address to the unmentionability of forms phonetically similar to the avoided name, a gradient scale of unmentionability is sketched out for the case of name taboos. Through the analysis of a wealth of examples, the paper shows how the patterning of the avoidance of a form is inextricably linked to its performative function and ideological conceptualization.

Australian Exceptionalism in the Typology of Affinal Avoidance Registers

This article systematizes speech registers employed in in-law avoidance into a cross-linguistic typology. Such affinal avoidance registers, consisting of lexical repertoires substituting for “everyday” speech forms tabooed for certain speakers or in certain contexts, are shown to typically diverge from one another in terms of two parameters, their context-sensitivity and the relatively idiolectal or sociolectal character of their register repertoires. Comparative data illustrate that Aboriginal Australian “mother-in-law” speech registers, which are context-sensitive and exclusively sociolectal, are highly exceptional among affinal avoidance registers cross-linguistically. In the final section of the article I seek to understand this exceptionalism in terms of the broader context of Aboriginal Australian ethnolinguistics.

Linguistic exogamy and language shift in the northwest Amazon

Abstract The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally patrilocal. This alignment between descent and post-marital residence means that the language which children are normatively expected to produce – the language of their patrilineal descent group – is also the language most widely spoken in the local community, easing acquisition of the target language. Indigenous migration to Catholic mission centers in the twentieth century and ongoing migration to urban areas along the Rio Negro in Brazil are reconfiguring the relationship between multilingualism and marriage. With out-migration from patrilineally-based villages, descent and post-marital residence are no longer aligned. Multilingualism is being rapidly eroded, with language shift from minority Eastern Tukanoan languages to Tukano being widespread. Continued practice of descent group exogamy even under such conditions of widespread language shift reflects how the semiotic relationship between language and descent group membership is conceptualized within the system of linguistic exogamy.