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ABSTRACT  Beginning with Edward Tylor's (1889) definition of culture as socially "acquired," I focus in this article on motion as social acquisition and transmission through "artifacts"—both durable (like ceramic pots) and fleeting (like sounds). Motion can be detected by comparison of the artifacts to which people are exposed with those they in turn produce. I examine rates of interaction with artifacts and changes in rates as evidence of the operation of "forces" such as interest and metaculture. I develop a set of axioms or laws of motion, growing out of fine‐grained research on naturally occurring discourse, and endeavor to demonstrate their utility through application to three empirical cases. Although I deal with relatively small‐scale artifacts, I conclude this article with the suggestion that its methods may prove useful in the broader study of cultural phenomena.

Over the past two decades, comparative linguistic anthropological research has disclosed the significance of metadiscourse and metasignaling forthe establishment, maintenance, and transformation of social relations. One type of metasignal‐signal relationship has, because of its role in producing sociability, come to seem especially interesting with regard to the evolutionary origins of human language—the type wherein a strategically (and presumably neocortically) induced metasignal is modeled after, but distinct from, an instinctively triggered signal, as in ritualized lamentation. Strategic vocal deceptions in nonhuman primates are possible precursors of true socially constructed, socially shared metasignals, which in turn may be ancestors of modern human language. This article charts an evolutionary path from strategic vocal manipulation, to cultural metasignals, to language, using data from primate studies, discourse‐centered research, and early child language acquisition. [Key words: language origins, semiotics, metacommunication, chimpanzees, early language acquisition]

Language and Communicative Practices. William F. Hanks. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 335 pp.

As a means of charting the complicated semiotic pathway leading from ceremonialized expressions of emotion to their underlying social motivations, this article undertakes a comparative investigation of the "ritual wailing" complex of Amerindian central Brazil. Based upon fine‐grained analyses of tape‐recorded instances of wailing, coupled with ethnographic descriptions of their social contexts, the article argues that ceremonialized affect is itself a sign vehicle, a form of "meta‐affect," designed to communicate a desire for sociability.