Language as a sociolinguistic toolkit serves three functions:
- Referential/ ideational
- Interpersonal/ expressive
- Textual/ poetic
Regardless of which function area it serves, text doesn’t carry intrinsic meaning. Their mandatory meaning resides within our cognitive system. Since Dadaist movement we see text appearing in contemporary arts in their own rights and their “meaning” often time challenged:
- Referential/ ideational
- Interpersonal/ expressive
- Textual/ poetic
Regardless of which function area it serves, text doesn’t carry intrinsic meaning. Their mandatory meaning resides within our cognitive system. Since Dadaist movement we see text appearing in contemporary arts in their own rights and their “meaning” often time challenged:
Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language (1966)
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965)
Rene Magritte, Key to Dreams (1930)
Tsang Kin-wah, Untitled – Bible (2002)
Anthropologist Richard Bauman has described the construction of identity with language as an ongoing interaction process:
“The addition of a third term, performance, to the nexus of language and identity, however, occasions a reorientation of analytical perspective. If we take performance in the sense of linguistic practice - situated, interactional, communicatively motivated – our investigative focus shifts from correlational sociolinguistics to the pragmatically oriented exploration of “when and how identities are interactively invoked by sociocultural actors” through the discursive deployment of linguistic resources (Kroskrity 1993: 222). In this perspective, identity is an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. This is clearly a productive line of inquiry, and one to which all of the contributors to this issue would subscribe.
While acknowledging and exploiting the analytical power of this practice-centered perspective, however, the authors of the papers collected here have taken an additional step into less well charted investigative territory, guided by a more marked conception of verbal performance. Here, performance is understood as a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy. In this sense of performance, the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience. Performance foregrounds form-function-meaning interrelationships through verbal display (Bauman 1977; Hymes 1975). “
Bauman, Richard, “Language, Identity, Performance” in Pragmatics 10:1.1-5 (Belgium: International Pragmatics Association, 2000)
Joanna Lee
Sep 3, 2015
Anthropologist Richard Bauman has described the construction of identity with language as an ongoing interaction process:
“The addition of a third term, performance, to the nexus of language and identity, however, occasions a reorientation of analytical perspective. If we take performance in the sense of linguistic practice - situated, interactional, communicatively motivated – our investigative focus shifts from correlational sociolinguistics to the pragmatically oriented exploration of “when and how identities are interactively invoked by sociocultural actors” through the discursive deployment of linguistic resources (Kroskrity 1993: 222). In this perspective, identity is an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. This is clearly a productive line of inquiry, and one to which all of the contributors to this issue would subscribe.
While acknowledging and exploiting the analytical power of this practice-centered perspective, however, the authors of the papers collected here have taken an additional step into less well charted investigative territory, guided by a more marked conception of verbal performance. Here, performance is understood as a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy. In this sense of performance, the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience. Performance foregrounds form-function-meaning interrelationships through verbal display (Bauman 1977; Hymes 1975). “
Bauman, Richard, “Language, Identity, Performance” in Pragmatics 10:1.1-5 (Belgium: International Pragmatics Association, 2000)
Joanna Lee
Sep 3, 2015
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