Jennifer Dickinson, James Herron, Laura Kunreuther, Mandana Limbert, Ellen Moodie, & Penelope Papailias (eds.), Linguistic form and social action. (Michigan discussions in anthropology, 13.) Ann Arbor: Anthropology Dept., University of Michigan, 1998. Pp. 283.

Abstract

As noted in this volume's Introduction by two of the editors, Jennifer Dickinson and Mandana Limbert, their collection displays work by students, alumni, and faculty of the University of Michigan Linguistic Anthropology Program, founded in 1991. The program's nature and development is evident in the coherence of the contents of the book, which consistently address the nature of the connections of immediate, ethnographically detailed (micro-level) deployment of linguistic form with the (macro-level) processes, institutions, and structures that frame such deployment as linguistic action. The essays generally fall into three categories: those focusing on a single speech event, those dealing with linguistic ideology, and those examining the ways in which language structure influences the form taken by social action. All these are framed by contemporary work on participation frameworks, on contextual structure and process, on dialogic emergence of meaning, on indexicality, and on linguistic ideology as cultural process played out in linguistic action. Stressing the emergent nature of structures and the continual, complex processes of indexical creativity, the authors develop in various and connected ways the linguistic ecology frame, as initiated by Einar Haugen and developed in much contemporary work in linguistic anthropology.