Language in Culture
Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language

Shows how identities, cultural categories and social groupings are forged semiotically, via dynamic, more or less subtle discursive rituals.

Michael Silverstein (Author)

9781009198844, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 December 2022

250 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.7 cm, 0.61 kg

'With his signature searing clarity and punning wit, Michael Silverstein at long last lays out in print what decades of students have heard - the detailed, layered, and at once remarkably robust and subtle semiotic mechanisms through which we co-construct our worlds, or wreck them, hold them in a precarious order or teeter off course.' Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Sociolinguistics [CFB]