Search results for "Indexicality"
showing 8 items of 18 documents
Girls strike back : the politics of parody in an indigenous TV comedy
2016
The diversification of the media has opened up new spaces for performances that seek not only to evoke laughter but also to voice social critique. One example of this development is the TV comedy show Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, created by two young women belonging to the indigenous Sámi people living in Finland. This paper focuses on one particularly critical sketch in the show: a counter-parody of a popular parody of the Sámi presented by two Finnish male comedians. The original sketch was a parody of ethnicity. As they strike back, however, the female presenters consciously foreground the categories of gender and class, thereby introducing a completely new figure: a white, urban, und…
Tautology as presumptive meaning
2008
Ever since the seminal work of Paul Grice, tautologies such as Business is business have been discussed from a number of angles. While most approaches assume that tautological utterances have to do with the operation of conversational maxims, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper makes an attempt at analysing tautologies within the framework of Levinson (2000), who proposes a distinction between three pragmatic levels, namely Indexical Pragmatics, Gricean Pragmatics 1, and Gricean Pragmatics 2. It is shown that observations of Ward and Hirschberg (1991) on the exclusion of alternatives, the claim of Autenrieth (1997) that the second NP in nominal equatives is predicative, and …
About the Speaker: Towards a Syntax of Indexicality
2013
I am very pleased to review this book which ties grammar to discourse—without implying that discourse ultimately shapes grammar or has an influence on it—a book written within the Chomskyan traditi...
Heteroglossia as a resource for reflexive participation in a community of Christian snowboarders in Finland
2013
This paper addresses the ways in which linguistic heteroglossia is mobilized to construct participation in a youth cultural community of practice. The analysis focuses on spoken interaction among Christian snowboarders in Finland, and specifically on how the community members create social meanings by using their shared linguistic resources (e.g. religious register or snowboarding terminology). These socially indexical resources gain new meanings when the snowboarders engage in debates concerning gender, expertise and literal versus non-literal interpretations of the Bible. During specific interactive events, they reflect on their responses to different Biblical discourses, thus aiming to r…
From the many voices to the subject positions in anti-globalization discourse: Enunciative pragmatics and the polyphonic organization of subjectivity
2011
This contribution presents enunciative pragmatics as a methodological orientation to account for how written texts are contextualized in the act of reading. As an offspring of the pragmatic turn among French-speaking linguists, the enunciative approach is mobilized to analyze the cover page of a cartoon on the anti-globalization legend Jose Bove. Focusing on the complex interpretive problems of political discourse, the enunciative-pragmatic approach shows how readers construct subject positions following the text's complex indexicality. It reveals the polyphonic play of voices orchestrated by the enunciative markers. Therefore, enunciative pragmatics promises to bridge the gulf that separat…
De Se as Variable Binding: On Context-Sensitivity in Utterance Reports
2020
In this paper I will be defending a view of de se attitudes according to which all the inaccuracies attributed to Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives having to do with the nature of de se attitude reports follow a single pattern: they are argued to correspond to bound uses of the variables contributed by the pronouns. I will argue that a traditional view of propositions suffices for dealing with these phenomena from a linguistic point of view.
The semantics of complex demonstratives: a defense of character theories
2021
Aquesta tesi defensa una aproximació tradicional a la semàntica de demostratius complexos, ço és, expressions com "aquesta taula" o "aquell home". A la teoria clàssica, els demostratius complexos funcionen com qualsevol altre díctic: tal com ocorre amb paraules com ara "jo", "ella" o "ací", es tracta termes que depenen del context i que estan dotats d'un significat descriptiu anomenat "caràcter" que ajuda a fixar-ne referent en cada situació d’ús però que no juga cap més rol una vegada aquest individu ha estat determinat. El seu contingut o contribució proposicional és, al seu torn, un simple objecte. Aquest model dels demostratius complexos es troba justificat en la mesura que les expressi…
Further notes on sociolinguistic scales
2015
AbstractThis short paper seeks to reformulate and refine the notion of sociolinguistic scales as relative scope of understandability, thus drawing the notion fully into the realm of semiotics, rather than in the rather unproductive sphere of spatiotemporal and distributional interpretation where it has been deployed. Differences in scope of understandability are differences in the presupposability of signs, and such differences are not equivalent but stratified in a polycentric environment. Scales, in that sense, point towards the non-unified and hierarchical-layered nature of the sign and of meaning making practices. Scalar effects, once established, can furthermore be carried over into di…