Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn
to beating out messages on the drums to playing instruments in a jazz band – are all semiotic modalities that deserve close analysis alongside talk, gesture, and other embodied communication. Oxbury, for example, analyzed a conversation among three sisters in which they broke into song periodically (Oxbury 2020), showing how the singing promotes solidarity and restores affiliation among the sisters at moments of trouble. And Harkness (2014) studied the relationship between voice, body, religion, and identity through participant observation in a Korean church choir (2014). In addition, from the perspective of another discipline, ethnomusicology is a field of study that draws upon and contributes to linguistic anthropology in fascinating ways, and vice versa (e.g., Black 2008; Duranti and Burrell 2004; Faudree 2013; Feld and Fox 1994; Samuels 2006).
Illustrations and images constitute yet another semiotic modality. Sometimes, illustrations supplement talk, as Green (2014) notes in her research on “sand stories,” which are narratives that are told by aboriginal people who live in Central Australia. As they tell their stories, they trace out images in the sand on the ground. In sand stories, Green writes, “Speech, sign, gesture, and drawing are deeply intertwined” (2014:3). Another example of a multimodal analysis of images, text, and speech is Feng’s (2019) study of the posters associated with Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” political slogan and campaign. Once we start paying attention, it becomes obvious that illustrations and all sorts of images, either created by the speakers themselves or simply referenced by them during the event, are woven into many interactions and are therefore an important semiotic modality. Here are just some examples:
Friends pass their phones back and forth to look at photos they took at a recent party.
A person sketches out a quick diagram on a piece of paper of the layout of rooms in a house.
Co-workers huddle together around a computer as they try to create an effective infographic for the data that their research group has produced.
A young child draws a picture of herself with curly hair as she signs her name on a birthday card for her grandmother.
Staff members at Studio Ghibli, an animation film studio in Tokyo, share drafts of a storyboard for their new anime.
We will be discussing literacy practices in much greater depth in Chapter 7, so for now it is sufficient merely to flag the presence of illustrations and other sorts of images as a modality that should not be overlooked when analyzing interactions.
Oftentimes, the very mode through which one chooses to communicate conveys a message in and of itself. Ilana Gershon (2010) discovered this in her study of the different ways that people use various kinds of social media to break up romantic relationships. If one’s boyfriend texts, “It’s over,” the modality of text messaging sends a very different message right from the start compared to the same words communicated over the phone or in person (or Facebook, e-mail, or some other form of writing) – or the lack of any words at all, which is what happens with ghosting when a person simply drops out of touch. Gershon uses the term media ideologies to talk about these differences – but we could also simply view the ideas that people have about various semiotic modalities as forms of language ideologies (cf. Gershon and Manning 2014).
So to conclude this chapter, we can see language is not just multifunctional, as Jakobson reminded us, but also multimodal. Therefore,interactions should be analyzed as integrated and embodied multimodal practices because even in the most mundane of interactions such as toothbrushing routines, meanings are conveyed and co-constructed by participants by means of multiple modes, potentially including, for example, speech, gesture, touch, eye gaze, prosody, song, poetry, whistling, whispering, and illustration. People may hold language ideologies about which of these modes should be used, or what it means in particular instances to combine one with another. This is because the different semiotic modalities can index different social identities, moral stances, or subtle opinions on various issues. All four of our key terms – multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality – can therefore be brought to bear on this topic.
3
The Research Process in Linguistic Anthropology
How do linguistic anthropologists actually go about conducting research? This question can be broken down into the following sub-questions, which are best addressed sequentially:
What kinds of research questions do linguistic anthropologists formulate?
What kinds of data do linguistic anthropologists collect, and with what methods?
How do linguistic anthropologists analyze their data in order to find answers to their research questions?
What sorts of ethical issues do linguistic anthropologists face?
Since methodological approaches vary greatly within linguistic anthropology, none of these questions will have a simple answer. Often, scholars in the field will make use of several different kinds of methods in order to obtain varying perspectives on the issues at hand. Many of these methods are also used by researchers in other fields, especially cultural anthropology. While linguistic anthropologists frequently borrow from methods closely associated with cultural anthropology, however, the reverse is not often the case – though maybe it should be. With greater familiarity with the tools and perspectives of linguistic anthropology, perhaps more cultural anthropologists and scholars in other fields will see the value of drawing upon the methods described below.
What Kinds of Research Questions Do Linguistic Anthropologists Formulate?
All research starts with one or more questions. Sometimes, these questions are rather inchoate in the mind of the researcher; other times, they are clearly articulated in grant proposals. At the outset of research, however, a scholar must be curious about something – and in linguistic anthropology this “something” usually concerns how language reflects and/or shapes some aspect of social life. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 1, this focus on language in real-life settings distinguishes linguistic anthropologists from many other scholars in fields such as linguistics or psychology who might be interested in language. As a result, the types of research questions linguistic anthropologists ask differ from those of most linguists, sociolinguists, cultural anthropologists, and other social scientists.
The specific formulation of any scholar’s research question may change as the research gets underway. This is also true for linguistic anthropologists because, as will be described below, many linguistic anthropologists conduct long-term fieldwork, often in very different cultural and linguistic settings than the researcher’s own, and such fieldwork can end up challenging the researcher’s initial assumptions. Like researchers from other fields such as cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropologists incorporate insights from their fieldwork into their research questions so that they more accurately reflect the way that the research subjects themselves talk or think about a certain topic. The research question can therefore often be a work in progress.
In Chapter 1, I summarized six ethnographies written by linguistic anthropologists. What follows is a list of some research questions these books and several others address:
How do place names and their use in conversations both illustrate and reinforce important Apache social relations and cultural values (Basso 1996)?
What do the arguments, storytelling episodes, and gossip of African American girls and boys tell us about the gendered nature of conversations and the ability of children to create rich, complex social worlds (Goodwin 1990)?
How does the use of Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans shed light on unequal racial, ethnic, political, and economic relations in New York City (Urciuoli 1996)?
In what ways does the presence or absence of a particular grammatical marker in Samoan political speeches and everyday conversations strengthen existing power relations (Duranti 1994)?
How do minority languages like Catalan come to be seen as authoritative? In what ways are people’s linguistic practices