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Title:
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Lexical Variation in Discourse: Socio-racial terms and identity in an Afromexican community
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Author:
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Chege Githiora
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Michigan State University
, Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages
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Degree Date:
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1999
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
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Director(s):
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Dennis R. Preston
Grover Hudson
Ruth Hamilton
David Dwyer
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Abstract:
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This work is an interpretive analysis of discourse focusing on situated lexical meanings in interactional settings and within other genres. The dissertation focuses on a set of socio-racial terms indio, blanco, negro and moreno used in a rural, Afromexican community as tags of social identity. Conversational data show how members of this speech community use socio-racial terms as 'footing' devices (Goffman 1981c) to align and re-align themselves with speaker or addressee according to their interactive goals. Using Gumperz's (1982) notion of situated inference, I illustrate a relationship between lexical items which are part of the surface structures of language, their use in discourse and, what they reveal of the social identity of their users. While these local meanings appear to be informed by a social context confined to this particular speech community they can also be linked to the wider domains of mainstream talk. I use naturally occuring data collected during fieldwork in this speech community, and, popular literature materials to highlight the differences between mainstream and local communicative functions of these terms, and to link local concepts of 'race' to Mexico's national discourse about race and identity.
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