Study Questions for A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology
Duranti, Alessandro,ed. Blackwell 2004.

[Updated March 2, 2007]

Bailey, Misunderstanding

1. What is the mechanism of "repair" in conversation and how does it work for people to achieve a common understanding? (Make sure to know a couple of examples)
2. What are the three levels of understanding (and misunderstanding) that Bailey borrows from sociologist Alfred Schutz?
3. What are the differences between the two explanations for inter-group misunderstanding as summarized by Bailey?
4. What are the differences between Athabaskan and Anglo interactional style as described by Scollon and Scollon (1981) and discussed by Bailey?
5. What is Gumperz's notion of contextualization cue and how does he use it to explain miscommunication and conflict?
6. What are some of the differences between male and female interactional style according to Maltz and Borker (1982)?
7. What do critics of the micro-interactional model of miscommunication say?
8. What is the speech accommodation theory?
9. In what sense can one argue, as Ochs (1996) does, that misunderstandings are "opportunities" in language socialization?

Keane, Language and Religion

1. In what sense is ritual speech performative?
2. What are some of the features of ritual and religious language?
3. What does entextualization mean?
4. Why is it necessary to distinguish among speaker, author, principal and animator in talking about religious speech?

Garrett, Language Contact and Contact Languages

1. What is a contact language (CL) according to Garrett?
2. What are some examples of CLs?
3. Ferguson introduced the concept of "diglossia." What kinds of situations does it refer to?
4. What does language convergence mean? Can you think of some examples (e.g. from the handout distributed in class)?
5. What is a pidgin? Can you think of some examples?
6. What is a creole?
7. What is Bickerton's "bioprogram and how is it supposed to explain the process of creolization?
8. What does "language shift" refer to?
9. How are language shift and language obsolescence tied?
10. How is language shift and language contact affected by the ideology called linguistic purism?

Keating and Egbert, Conversation as a Cultural Activity

1. What does it mean to say that conversation has a role in establishing and maintaining identities, subjectivities, categories, attitudes and values?
2. Why is conversation a cultural practice?
3. What is the role of conversation in language socialization?
4. How are social categories produced in conversation?
5. How does the study of conversation reveal certain limitations of the exclusive use of intuitions for studying language?
6. What is "recipient design"'?

Kulick and Schieffelin, Language Socialization

1. In what sense is language socialization a response to two absences in psycholinguistic and anthropological studies of children?
2. What are the 3 criteria for a language socialization study for Kulick and Schieffelin?
3. What other approaches or disciplines does language socialization draw from?
4. In what sense is affect and emotions important for language socialization?
5. What are "bad subjects"?
6. How are children socialized to fear?
7. What is the "grammar of desire"?
8. What is an example of the production of "new subjects"?

LeMaster and Monaghan, Variation in Sign Languages

1. What is a sign language?
2. How do we know that sign language is NOT universal?
3. How do we know that sign language is not a signed spoken language?
4. What do the authors say about sign language variation?
5. What are some examples of the relationship between language variation and identity in Deaf communities?

Mithun, The Value of Linguistic Diversity: Viewing Other Worlds through North American Indian Languages

1. How did government and scholars react to language diversity in North America?
2. How do we know whether American Indian languages are related?
3. Why was the term "polysynthetic" applied to American Indian languages?
4. What are evidentials?
5. What are some of the ways in which American Indian languages are different from Indo-European languages?

Morgan, Speech Communities

1. What are the different definitions of speech community discussed by Morgan?
2. What does Morgan say about the different point of view of speakers and theorists?
3. What is the relationship between keying and frame?
4. What is the difference between the way in which some sociolinguists talked about AAE and the ways in which it is actually used and valued within the AAE speech community?
5. What does the example of MCSolaar and Guru show?

Ochs, Narrative Lessons

1. Can you explain with some examples what Ochs means when she writes "As social activity, narratives of personal experience the world over tend to be dialogic, co-told, and even co-authored"?
2. What does it mean to say that narrative of personal experience give temporal and causal orderliness in life events?
3. What is "human time" in Ochs' account of narratives?
4. What are the two narrative practices described by Ochs as organizing the "logic" of experience recounted in narratives?
5. What is the difference between "detached" and "embedded narratives"?

Philips, Language and Social Inequality

1. What is "authoritative speech"?
2. What are some of the ways in which social inequality is manifested through language in (1) bureaucratic settings, (2) gender differences, (3) the political economy of a community, and (4) colonial or post-colonial situations?
3. What does Philips say about turn control, question control, control of ratification in institutional settings?

Woolard, Codeswitching

1. What is codeswitching (CS) according to Woolard?
2. Utilizing the handout on bilingualism and CS distributed in class, can you think of some examples of conversational CS?
3. What is the difference between "situational" and "metaphorical" CS (two notions originally introduced by Blom and Gumperz)?
4. How do we know how to distinguish between CS and borrowing? Can you give some examples of borrowings? (See handout distributed in class)
5. Concepts like intentions, "footing," Bakhtin's "voicing" and indexicality have been used to talk about the functions of codeswitching or what CS accomplishes. Can you think of some examples in which these concepts can be useful to explain what speakers do when they change from one code or variety to another?