Chad Nilep
Shifting your deictic center
In this guest post Anna Marie Trester, Director of the MA in Language and Communication (MLC) at Georgetown University, explains how the linguistic theory of deictics can help job seekers think about themselves from potential employers’ points of view.
AAA Elections 2013
Elections for American Anthropological Association positions, including President-Elect, Executive Board members, and several committee positions, as well as elections for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and other sections are open now until 31 May, 2013.
Calls for papers: AAA 2013 panels
Members of SLA and AAA are issuing calls for papers to join panels for the AAA annual meeting via linguistic anthropology email list LINGANTH. Links to recent calls are here.
Arana: Good sociolinguistic conclusion despite questionable examples
Gabriel Arana recently published a defense of creaky voice at The Atlantic. He notes that recent criticism of young women’s use of creaky voice, or “vocal fry”, is part of a long tradition of critiquing the speaking styles of less powerful groups of people. Arana’s conclusion that “normative judgments about linguistic prestige are relative, and merely reflect social attitudes” is absolutely correct and well-known to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language. The particular speech patterns he analyses to support his conclusion – up-talk, like, and creak – are somewhat questionable, however.
Where have all the numbers gone? (Or 1 + 99 = 53 + 47)
In 2011 the American Dialect Society listed ‘the 99%’ among its Words of the Year. In 2012 ’47%’ became the new politically-charged number. These numbers are connected in a way that might not be obvious.
Mitt Romney was recorded declaring, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” Because they pay no income tax, Romney suggested, 47% of Americans are dependent on government. This resembles a charge made in 2011 by conservative activists at the53.tumblr, which in turn was a response to the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated wearethe99percent.tumblr.
SLA Presidential Panel
The inaugural SLA presidential panel entitled: Frontiers in Methodology in Linguistic Anthropology has been organized for Thursday evening from 7:30-9pm in Union Square 22. Charles Goodwin, Marjorie H. Goodwin, Brendan O’Connor, Susan Philips and Deborah Tannen will be discussing how current theoretical interests within our subdiscipline have influenced how we do fieldwork. We encourage all the membership to come together to discuss and debate the current state of methodologies in our discipline(s).
Why preschool hasn’t saved the world
Radio programs have recently celebrated a “new understanding” of the importance of preschool for success later in life. Related knowledge has been part of academic discussion for decades, but has had relatively little effect on how education is organized. To contribute to public understanding, I summarize Shirley Brice Heath’s “What no bedtime story means” (1982).
American Anthropological Association 2012 Annual Meeting
A preliminary schedule for the American Anthropological Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting has been released. This schedule includes more that 50 linguistic and language-related panel sessions.
AAA Ethics Grant
Applications for AAA Committee on Ethics small grants for ethics curricular materials are due 2 November 2012. A grant of between $200 and $1,000 is available.
Danish media reactions to Journal of Linguistic Anthropology paper
In this guest post Martha Sif Karrebæk relates how her Journal of Linguistic Anthropology paper, “What’s in your lunchbox today?”, became a topic of discussion in Danish mass media.
