So far, in these lectures, we have seen how an unfolding denotational text-in-context figurates the identities and interactional textual projects of particular participants, furthering their apparent goals in the interaction. Our analysis of the transcript of Mr. A and Ms. C as well as that of Mr. Black and Ms. Mercer in Lecture 3 demonstrated how deictics (indexical referentials) and social indexicals – as elements of pragmatic paradigms – are centrally involved as they are metricalized into segmentations of phases in discursive space-time. We also saw that these unique communicative events, like all events, are interdiscursively connected in fields of interactions.

In the last lecture, we set the background for being able to talk at all about “linguistic relativity” by reviewing the post-Enlightenment concern with language as the instrument of rationality – grammar and logic in the medieval trivium – as well as by introducing the problem that linguistic diversity poses for it, let alone the diversity of the cast-off third member of the trivium, rhetoric, that is, the socioculturally effective use of language in events of communication. We then developed the necessary strategy of structural or formal linguistics if it is to be an empirical science of language by first considering the phonologico-phonetic categoriality of language. We then expanded this analysis by considering other planes of language, an approach we develop here. Our analysis suggested that “meanings” or “concepts” as projected from formal distributional categorizations.

We experience social life through the central medium of verbal messages. What coordination we achieve with others depends upon the fact that we talk to each other; we write and read in graphic forms; we manually sign (as well as gesture) in the visual channel. But what do we know about how verbal messages really work? No matter what your English composition teacher might have told you, I think linguistic anthropologists have developed new light to shed on the matter.

What do we know about the universe? And why? In particular, what are the categories of knowledge, the principles by which we recognize phenomena – for example, phenomena of perception – and by which we imagine things and situations in imaginary universes? How much of that knowledge is somehow reflected in, or reflects, language and/or discourse? How, then, do we communicate and share that knowledge? How much of the knowledge that language codes is universal in some sense, and how much is socio-historically specific? To answer these questions we need a revision of the account of language as handed down to us by Western philosophy, arguably as early as Plato’s Cratylus and continuing into the post-Enlightenment theories of language.

In the last lecture we showed how “what is said” or conveyed in-and-by discourse indexically presumes upon or “indexically presupposes” certain conditions in the context of an emerging entextualization, revealed in the emerging metrical patterns of denotational information organized by deixis, repetition, parallelism (repetition with semantic substitutions), and on occasion by metricalizing discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987) like so, well, yeah, et cetera.

As social scientists we study the events of communication so as to reveal something about the way the order of social formations is experienced and sometimes revealed to those within. We study both the way these formations are drawn into events in which those within attempt to coordinate one with another and how such events are part and parcel of how such social formations come into being, persist over historical time, and are transformed. We are devoted to the goal of giving an adequate account of how we “do things with words” and with other modalities of interpersonal behavior, looking “upward” and “outward” from particular events to the framing sociocultural structures that give meaning and value to event-bound particulars. The received wisdom for how to go about the study of such coordination is to start with individual communicative events, senders and receivers, and the informational messages that they transmit to each other. We, too, will begin there, though we will quickly see the narrowness and insufficiency of such an approach.

Signification, circulation, and emanation are the three rubrics through which we analyzed enregisterment as a cultural process in the previous lecture. Recall that signification is the organization and interpretation of indexicality in the textuality of events, out of which registers emerge. Circulation is a metaphor for processes of interdiscursivity that move across events of communication, bringing registers together in various ways, forming myriad relationships across communicative events. The motive force of such dynamic connections among events is propulsive emanation, driven by processes of ideologically informed metapragmatics – templates or schemata for interpreting enregistered indexicality – as they emerge from and spread across institutional sites of value-creating ritual action.

Where, indeed, do cultural concepts come from? Whorf was the first to propose a general way of understanding the emergence of cultural concepts, so he will be our main guide as we build on our earlier lectures to see how cultural categories are formed from the confluence of grammatical structure, denotational domains, and the sociocultural practice of using textualized language within broader historical process. We’ll also draw on the work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language as well as examples from the sociocultural anthropology of Stanley Tambiah so as to generate our own account of cultural conceptualization.

In the last lecture, we focused on ritual and ritualized uses of language that seem to bring into being (that is, indexically entail) certain contextual conditions. They do this as a function of the occurrence of some formulaic (that is, densely and rigidly metricalized) linguistic form-tokens. We might say that such form-tokens render salient and explicit a current contextual focus of the emerging interactional text. By interactional text, here we mean the social coordination through which the pantomime of interaction is interpreted by participants along dimensions of social identity and eventhood. In this way, analyzing discourse as the mediator of social life rests on understanding how both big and little pieces of denotational text come to serve as the effective signals of who – as sociological types – the interactants “are” or “seem to be” at every phase of interaction and how they perform social acts. When “appropriate,” such social acts are licensed by who/what the interactants are, and when “inappropriate,” they challenge or make a bid for re-definition of self and/or other(s).