Accent, Interaction, and Intimacy on the Autism Spectrum Kira Hall University of Colorado Boulder If intimacy is collaboratively produced in interaction, as discourse analysts argue, then how do individuals with atypical interactional behaviors achieve it? This paper addresses a sociolinguistic practice noted for individuals on the autism spectrum but rarely analyzed: the sustained adoption of non-local dialect features. For sociolinguists who view second dialect acquisition as a social achievement importantly related to identity, this practice ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...