Suchergebnisse

'Language without Rights' is a critique of the concept of language rights. Synthesizing insights from a variety of disciplines, including linguistic anthropology, sociology sociolinguistics & political philosophy, Wee demonstrates how the appeal to language rights faces a number of conceptual & practical problems.

Langauge and Discrimination provides a unique and authoritative study of the linguistic dimension of racial discrimination. Based upon extensive work carried out over many years by the Industrial Language Training Service in the U.K, this illuminating analysis argues that a real understanding of how language functions as a means of indirect racial discrimination must be founded on an expanded view of language which recognises the inseparability of language, culture and meaning.After initially introducing the subject matter of the book and providing an overview of discrimination and language le

Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples - from brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how we think about language and culture.

China is facing a language endangerment crisis, with half of its languages decreasing in number of speakers. This article contributes to the understanding of language endangerment in China with a case study of the Gochang language, which is spoken by about 10,000 Tibetans in western Sichuan. We describe Gochang as an "invisible" language – one that is overlooked by the state's ethnic and linguistic policies and thus is more vulnerable to the social transformations wrought by statist development. Using UNESCO's language vitality and endangerment framework to assess the endangerment of Gochang, we conclude that the language is "definitely endangered." Our comparison of Gochang with other "invisible" languages in China shows that most are in a similar predicament, suggesting that China's language endangerment crisis is likely to continue unless these languages receive formal recognition or local governments take advantage of ambiguities in the policy framework to support them. The social impacts of a continuing, deepening language endangerment crisis in China are as yet unknown. (China Q/GIGA)

For everyday communication, bilingual speakers need to face the complex task of rapidly choosing the most appropriate language given the context, maintaining this choice over the current communicative act, and shielding lexical selection from competing alternatives from non-target languages. Yet, speech production of bilinguals is typically flawless and fluent. Most of the studies available to date constrain speakers' language choice by cueing the target language and conflate language choice with language use. This left largely unexplored the neural mechanisms underlying free language choice, i.e., the voluntary situation of choosing the language to speak. In this study, we used fMRI and Multivariate Pattern Analysis to identify brain regions encoding the target language when bilinguals are free to choose in which language to name pictures. We found that the medial prefrontal cortex encoded the chosen language prior to speaking. By contrast, during language use, language control recruited a wider brain network including the left inferior frontal lobe, the basal ganglia, and the angular and inferior parietal gyrus bilaterally. None of these regions were involved in language choice. We argue that the control processes involved in language choice are different from those involved in language use. Furthermore, our findings confirm that the medial prefrontal cortex is a domain-general region critical for free choice and that bilingual language choice relies on domain general processes. ; CR and SSA were supported by the PRIN grant 2010RP5RNM_001 from the Italian Ministry of University; AC was supported by two grants from the Spanish Government, PSI2011-23033, PSI2014-52181-P, a grant from the Catalan government (AGAUR SGR 268), and a grant from the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013 Cooperation grant agreement nº 613465 - AThEME).

This volume offers fresh, cutting-edge perspectives on issues of language and citizenship by casting a critical light on a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts – Flanders, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, the UK - and discourse data – policy documents, newspaper articles, ethnographic notes and interviews, skits, bodies in protests. The main aims of the book are to investigate institutional discourses about the relationship between nationality and citizenship, and relate such discourses to more ethnographically grounded interactions; tease out the multiple and often conflicting meanings of citizenship; and explore the different linguistic/semiotic guises that citizenship might take on in different contexts. The book argues that the linguistic/discursive study of citizenship should not only include critical investigations of political proposals about language testing, but should also encompass the diverse, more or less mundane, ways in which various social actors enact citizenship with the help of an array of multivocal, material, and affective semiotic resources. Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics 14:3 (2015).

How are language, identity and war related? This exploratory essay probes the conceptual and logical connections among these three elemental factors of human existence, offers thoughts about an alternative discourse, and takes a look at suggestive data regarding the tie between violence and identity. I posit that who we are, what we say and when we fight are inseparable from one another. In this argumentative essay, language is seen as forming a nucleus of identity, identity as being forged in conflict, and discourse marking our path to, through and out of war and peace. Abating identity threats through identity-affirming discourse may, I conclude, be the best and most lasting tool towards peace.

I Congresso Internacional América Latina e Interculturalidade: América Latina e Caribe: cenários linguístico-culturais contemporâneos, 07, 08 e 09 de novembro de 2013 - UNILA ; This article distinguishes between language policy and linguistic policies. The first one is also named the politics of language, which interprets the essentials of language diversity as a problem, as rights or as linguistic capital. It analyzes at the national and international level, whereas linguistic policies are the constraints that can be understood from linguistic rights and they follow a certain language policy. These constraints are measures at the intra­national level. Then, the plurilingualism of Bolivia is overt thanks to the recognition of languages at the meso and macro level, say, in the community and in the society.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: The corporeal turn -- The corporeal turn -- Chapter 2: There is no meaning in language -- Chapter 3: Meaning as quasi-perceptual -- The other of language -- The body and quasi-perceptual grasp -- Mental images in cognitive science -- Perceptual readings -- The as-structure of meaning -- Chapter 4: The body in deixis and reference -- Implicit deixis -- Reference -- Reference and the body -- Chapter 5: Sign rapport: meaning as intersemiotic -- Conclusion -- Chapter 6: Sign conflict: meaning as heterosemiotic -- Conclusion -- Chapter 7: The disembodiment of the signifier -- Chapter 8: The corporeality of the signified -- Chapter 9: Social traces in abstract expressions -- Chapter 10: The role of the community -- Conclusion -- Chapter 11: Sufficient semiosis -- Chapter 12: Semantic assumptions -- Chapter 13: Meaning, metaphysics and representation -- Afterword: Corporeal semantics and the obsolete body -- Bibliography -- Index.