Jack Sidnell and NJ Enfield

In this complicated and subtle article, Sidnell and Enfield develop the idea that not only lexicogrammatical patterns themselves and the views of the world which they imply are non-trivially relative from language to language, but there is also a "third locus" relating to the way we do things with words--things like agreeing, assessing, challenging, threatening, comforting, and on and on are done differently according to the resources and affordances of different languages. They take as an example "epistemically authoritative second position assessment," or agreeing with someone else's assessment in a way that captures for yourself general acknowledgment of expertise, power as arbiter, right to elaborate further, or similar. (An English example might be something like where you cut off the very end of someone else's utterance and go "Yeah, no, I know" and then elaborate--the pragmatic meaning being something like "You are conveying information already massively familiar to me. I will go ahead and elaborate now in a way that presumably I can but you cannot." Or "Actually, Bill's right: [...]"; the message is "I have the stature to guarantee someone else's correctness." Sidnell and Enfield look at the way this is done across several languages in a way that produces different "collateral effects" (capturing a discourse turn, endorsing an opinion while makin the person expressing it look like a buffoon, conveying that there is important additional information to be given, creating an air of finality or topic change, etc.). I don't need much convincing on stuff like this, but they are careful and cautious and if you need convincing this might well do. Current Anthropology 53(3).… (más)