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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod



Academic Paper


Title: “Eating the food of our place”: Sociolinguistic loyalties in multidialectal Sui villages
Author: James N. Stanford
Email: click here to access email
Homepage: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~linguist/faculty/stanford.html
Institution: Dartmouth College
Linguistic Field: Sociolinguistics
Abstract: Among the Sui people of rural southwestern China, descent-group loyalties are closely tied to linguistic features. In every village, long-term dialect contact occurs between local villagers and in-marrying women from different clans, yet most speakers maintain their original dialect features to a high degree. The present study conducts ethnographic interviews to more deeply understand why such behavior occurs. Most current, practice-based models of identity tend to emphasize dynamic, flexible, individualistic choices – an approach that suits variation on many levels in many societies. However, to understand the descent-group loyalties particular to indigenous, non-Western, clan-based cultures like Sui, a more tempered, culturally sensitive model is necessary. Speakers show a deep sense of stability, permanence, and collective loyalty to communities of descent, (re)produced through stable linguistic expressions: acts of loyalty. The study also highlights the use of indigenous minorities’ own categories (place, toponyms, lineage) rather than non-indigenous categories.

CUP at LINGUIST

This article appears in Language in Society Vol. 38, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .



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