“Cultural” Concepts and the Language‐Culture Nexus

“In the context of proposing a theory of language and culture, Silverstein (2004) has focused on the processes by which linguistic forms acquire social meanings, so his taxonomy is more abstract than Labov’s.”

“‘Right’ or ‘appropriate’ must be understood as ‘sociocultural conceptualizations’ (Silverstein, 2004) ideologically shaped and defined from and within a social group.”

“The verbal patterns so perceived have the capacity to resonate with culturalsemantic, thematic patterns (Lemke, 1983; Thibault, 1989) or “knowledge schemata” (Silverstein, 2004) and to provide access to them.”

“Linguistic anthropologists have known for some time that regions with linguistic commonalities share the ways in which social organizations are constructed (e.g., Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Duranti, et al., 2003; Silverstein, 2004).”

“They cluster around particular social arenas and become generative in those arenas (a process called ‘enregisterment’: Agha 2007; Silverstein 2004), but have no automatic applicability outside of them.”

“…of the field that we got fully developed notions of language ideology and indexicality, new insights into the social and cultural foundations of language and speech, and a fundamental questioning of the modernist concept of language (see, e.g., Agha 2007; Bauman and Briggs 2003; Silverstein 2004).”

“Silverstein (2004) suggests that social interaction is structured by a dialectical interplay between pragmatic and metapragmatic features, between the way signs are placed in the world and the way they represent their own being-in-theworld.”

“First, it shifts the focus somewhat away from language use as the mediator of human sociality (e.g., Silverstein 2004) to nonlinguistic social behavior and to structure of social actions.”

“This is not the goal of Levinson’s book; as Hanks (2006) points out in his review, the lack of sustained ethnographic attention is reflective of the fact the book is not really directed to anthropology. colleagues (e.g., Silverstein 1976, 1979, 1981, 1985, 1987, 2003, 2004).”

“…linguistic sense (that is, how linguistic features such as accents or pronunciation patterns can have particular meanings within social interaction [Silverstein 2004]) intersects with value in the economic sense (such as how products are assessed and acquire quantifiable value via processes of…”

“This research draws on recent theories about sociolinguistic scales and spatial analysis (Blommaert 2005a, 2006; Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005a, 2005b), which are formed within a language ideologies framework (notably Silverstein 2004 and Blommaert 2005a).”

“For crucial discussions of typification and metapragmatics that are far too detailed for me to do justice to here see Agha (2007), Silverstein (2004).”

“In any case I think it is fairly clear that with the emergence of a highly visible discourse of ‘endangered languages’ over the last 10 years or so, languages have entered the realm of prestige consumption (cf. Silverstein, 2004, pp. 640ff).”

“…literacy practices and language use while moving (i.e. walking) even before the advent of smart phones (Scollon and Scollon 2003) has shown that mobility and the shifting contexts (Silverstein 2004) and contingencies afforded by mobility significantly influence how talk-in-interaction is conducted.”

“Agha (2007:96–103) has explicitly teamed the study of “propositional stance” (understood as evaluations of propositional content, epistemic or otherwise, anchored to a participation framework; cf. Silverstein 2004:622–23) with the study of text-metricality.”

“Note the contrast with a prestige comestible like wine, the ritual consumption of which is mediated by an elaborate ‘oinoglossic’ register (Silverstein 2003, 2004).”

“6 Rather than taking reference and performance as polar extremes and assigning pragmatic efficacy only to the latter, Silverstein 2004 demonstrates the utility of seeing reference as central to a speech act’s ability to perform or produce (see also Reddy 2001:97–98).”

“That is to say, linguistic agency—or what was possible to do with words— was differentially constrained by the organizational identi- ties that people were assigned and inhabited (cf. Kockelman 2007; Silverstein 2004).”

“Silverstein (2004) points to the ‘knowledge schemata’ that anchor some cultural concepts and (by implication) discourses; Boromisza-Habashi (2010) gives the same status to a community’s ‘moral universe’ (moral norms).”

“Interesting things happen when Wauja meet up with what linguistic anthropologists call Standard Average European speakers, like the SIL linguists who collected some of the word lists Ball consulted (see Silverstein 2004).”

“While some researchers see the relationship as complementary (Kasper & Omori, 2010; Selmeski, 2007), others go further to point out a more complex interrelationship (Kramsch, 2003; Silverstein, 2004; Watson, 2010).”

“…constructed ‘‘dispositional field’’ provides the ground across and within which deixis, implicature, and other implicit referential and relational systems play themselves out, in terms of which they must be contextualized (Groark, 2009; see also Silverstein, 2004; Hanks, 2005; Haviland, 2010).”

“(This will come as no surprise to students of ritual, because it has long been noted that ritual generally, whether of the Goffmanian [1967] “interaction ritual” sort or the more official, elaborated, public varieties [Silverstein 2004], tends to separate itself from its surround [Keane 1997].)”

“This is not surprising given the nexus of language and culture (Fong, 2012; Risager, 2006; Silverstein, 2004).”

“If, as Silverstein (2004) claims, culture is articulated and made manifest through patterned (‘genred’), interactive negotiation of meanings and values, then using a genre-based approach may provide useful insight into the cultural roots of metaphor.”

“…strong tradition in the field of linguistic anthropology investigating the study of a variety of religious genres (and their blends) for the cultural insights they o¤er (Hanks 2006; Keane 1997; Poveda et al. 2005; Robbins 2001; Shoaps 2002; Silverstein 2004; Tambiah 1985; Wilce 2001; among others).”

“Interactions between national and institutional actors within the EU thus define the borders of legitimate discourses, and in-group discursive articulations concur to fix meanings by means of ‘sociocultural conceptualisations’ (Silverstein, 2004 in Reyes, 2011).”

“Silverstein (1976/1995, 1992 , 1993 , 2003 , 2004 ) has argued that reference and denotation are not enough to account for important functions of language; pragmatic and socially indexical functions need to be explained.”

“…uniform usage in the literature, the term ‘Nexus’ is used broadly in different forms and for different purposes, for example, as ‘saving and investment nexus’ in the field of finance and economics (Narayan, 2005), or ‘language-culture nexus’ in an anthropology context (Silverstein, 2004).”

“Pichler &Williams (2016) bring the study of HHNL to the UK, showing how a group of four young men use specific linguistic features to index cultural concepts (Silverstein 2004) that serve to authenticate their identities in relation to hip-hop culture and what it represents.”

“Language Ideologies The study of language ideologies compliments CPA in prioritizing the ideological underpinnings of language and its use (González, 2005; Razfar, 2006; Rosa & Burdick, 2017; Silverstein, 1979, 2004).”

“In highly ideological environments, not only explicit ideological tenets are manifested, but also, and perhaps more so, covert processes of trivialization, naturalization, and essentialization (Silverstein 2004).”

“Others are stereotypes based on the various cultural understandings that participants bring to the interaction, which are activated and made relevant in that specific interaction (Agha 2007; Silverstein 2004).”

“The linguistic and para-linguistic elements that establish this kind of ‘pointing-to relationship’ (Silverstein, 2004: 626) are indexicals, which can assume the shape of deictics, tense, demonstratives and more.”

“It is a ritual practice that is based on the production of a very precise “diagrammatic” or “figurational equivalence” (Silverstein 2004:626) between the two spatiotemporal planes of the classroom and the original “mythical” event in which the improvisation was created and recorded.”

“Because all language use enacts “ cultural concepts ” (Silverstein, 2004), it should not come as a surprise that LLMs trained on human linguistic behavior embed representations of culture.”

“…out to be what they were in the first place: Bakhtinian organic hybrids, with their own politics and histories of normalization—part and parcel of the building blocks, in other words, of those very worlds that classifying animals like us cannot but erect around themselves (Silverstein 2003, 2004)?”

“Infinite Semiosis In his work on indexicality and metaindexicality, Silverstein (2003; 2004) analyzes the recursive properties of human thinking as applied to the use of language in representing not only social-cultural meaning (values, local knowledge structures, social roles, etc) but the…”

“…notion of recursive orordered indexicality, introducedas “the concept necessary to showing us how to relate themicro-social to themacro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon” (Silverstein 2003: 193; see also Silverstein 2004; Blommaert 2005; Johnstone 2007; Briggs 2018).”

“When the latter consists to any significant extent of identity categories, the mutual involvement of the two “texts” is obvious (Silverstein 2004:622–25).”

“Finally, semiotics is not limited to unpacking the meaning of signs; it is concerned not so much with what signs are saying (contra Geertz) as what they are doing (see Silverstein 2004, 2005).”

“…may, in turn, come to function metapragmatically: saying something about the act being undertaken, guiding interpretation of what is being done, what people are doing, and what roles people are inhabiting, as well as defining the situation in progress (Silverstein 2004; Fleming and Lempert 2014).”

“Perhaps the works of Agha (2003), Cepek (2008a, 2008b), Guyer (2004), and Silverstein (2004), at once fiercely theoretical and deeply empirical, most clearly resonate with these ideas.”

“However, studies on metaphor and recent advances in linguistic anthropology have shown that all discursive acts often tend to go in the direction of figurative usage (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Silverstein 2004).”