John B. Haviland will present a lecture on “K’alal Lajyak’bekon Notisia, ‘Bweno Ta Xinupunkutik’, Gloria a Dios, Háganlo Bien (When they told me ‘Well, we’re getting married’—Glory to God! Do it well!): Changing Tzotzil Discourses of Marriage.” Haviland is an anthropological linguist, with interests in the social life of language, including gesture, emerging sign languages, and interaction. His work concentrates on Tzotzil (Mayan) speaking peasant corn farmers from Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, and on speakers of ...

Discursive Strategies of Dominance: How Publics Are Homogenized Scholars have been noting for many years the increasingly polyphonous, fractured and heterogeneous discourses that have gained public visibility in this era of the internet, “superdiversity” and “globalization.” Yet, if we look around the world, we see many recent processes – equally remarkable – that move in a different direction: There is a closing down and homogenization of mass mediated political talk. Right wing parties in power ...

This study investigates the sequentially occasioned provision of what I term ‘category accounts’ in interaction. Category accounts tap into and make use of normative assumptions about identities and membership categories in order to explain away moments of what the participants view as category deviance. To introduce this concept, I focus on sequences in which speakers’ initiations of repair (e.g., Huh?) are oriented to as indicative of a problem of understanding. In the cases examined here, ...

This talk explores bilingual women’s social and narrative positioning as informal linguistic brokers (or community interpreters) in a rural town dependent on the industrial processing of fresh kosher meat-products. Specifically, it addresses how these women as “community accountants” employed reflexive interdiscursivity and oriented to different modernist chronotopes to re-analyze the cultural politics of migrant labor (Bakhtin 1981; See Chávez 2015; Dick 2010, 2017; Perrino 2011; Reynolds 2017). Their accounts shed insight into what happens when ...

The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion in the analysis of naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. This year’s conference theme is “Disrupt and Advance.” We understand ‘disrupt’ broadly as actions or ideas that intervene in or challenge the established theoretical, institutional, or narrative frame. The emphasis on disruption is an intentional examination of ...

The Language, Interaction, and Social Organization GSO is pleased to host the 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Social Organization on May 19–20, 2023, at UCSB. The LISO conference promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion in the analysis of naturally occurring human interaction. Papers will be presented by national and international scholars on a variety of topics in the study of language, interaction, and culture. Register to attend here For more information, visit the conference ...