CHAPTER 10

LANGUAGE,
CULTURE, AND
INTERACTION

JESSICA I. LAXAMANA
The Problem of Language
Language is like the air we breathe. It is
just there, used but, for the most part,
unnoticed. It can be a problem if you don’t
speak the language that you need to know
in order to understand what others are
saying or doing.

Ex. Traveling to Japan and you don’t know

how to speak Japanese
The Problem of Language

…‘language’ as the medium of

communication and thought, and
‘language’ as in French, Urdu, or
Ojibwa, are not the same thing,
though named with the same word.
The Problem of Language
The reflective oddity comes about
when one considers that reflecting on
multiple meaning (or polysemy) does
not generally lead the professional,
scientific language inquirer in the
direction of noticing further and further
variability to the point of losing the
determinate object assumed to be
named by the word.
 The Problem of Language

Hockett’s classic linguistics textbook

does recognize that ‘the ease with
which people can understand each
other, and the degree of resemblance of
their speech habits, are both functions
of the amount of talking that takes place
among them’ (1958: 326),
The Problem of Language

…but rather than leading the linguist to

investigate such talking, including its
geographical context for the speakers,
mutual intelligibility leads back via
‘idiolect differentiation’ to the idea of a
‘common core’ and ‘overall pattern’ in the
structure of the presupposed determinate
object, ‘language’ (1958: 331ff.).
Culture
…an ‘integrated and distinct set of
rules which give meaning to activities’
(Sharrock and Anderson 1982: 120) or,
famously, ‘whatever it is one has to
know or believe to operate in a
manner acceptable to [a society’s
members], and do so in any role that
they accept for any one of themselves’
(Goodenough 1957:167) –
Culture

For many of its uses ‘culture’

may be replaced with ‘society’,
‘values’, ‘customs’, ‘mores’, ‘the
way we do things round here’
without it ever being possible to
pin down once and for all what
that ‘way’ is.
Culture

Cultures as determinate objects

are professional anthropologists’
inventions, the product of
‘ethnographic work’ in the
‘organization of fieldwork data’
(Anderson and Sharrock 1982).
3. Language and culture:
(ethnographic) semantics
Ethnographic semantics, or
ethnosemantics (see Chapter 4 this
volume), is one field that,straddling the
boundary of linguistics and cultural
(cognitive) anthropology, has
acknowledged the problem of
variability in the meaning of words and
attempted to deal with it in its own
terms.
Language and culture:
(ethnographic) semantics

‘Variations are not mere deviations

from some assumed basic
organization; with their rules of
occurrence they are the
organization’ (Tyler 1969: 5)
Language and culture:
(ethnographic) semantics

Rules of occurrence can then be

adumbrated in terms of ‘core’ or
‘primary’ meanings, ‘metaphor’ or
‘extended’ meanings, and
‘polysemy’ and ‘homonymy’, these
last two being used as intermediate
disambiguating devices (Scheffler
and Lounsbury 1971
Language and culture:
(ethnographic) semantics
In a search for rigour the ingenious
practice is followed whereby such
expressions are first transformed into ideal
expressions. Structures are then analyzed as
properties of the ideals, and the results are
assigned to actual expressions as their
properties, though with disclaimers of
‘appropriate scientific modesty’. (Garfinkel
and Sacks 1970: 339)
Language, Culture, and
Interaction
Returning to the (ethno-)semantic argument about
word meaning, consider the following two data
consisting of a sign in a bookstore window
advertising a sale, and a two-utterance exchange
overheard on a university campus sidewalk as A
and B crossed paths.

(1) Books and paperbacks

(2) A: Do you want a coffee?

B: No, I’ve just eaten

 Language, Culture, and
Interaction

Now while these two cases might at

first appear to contradict simple
taxonomic relations that one might
propose for the domains of ‘books’ and
of ‘food’ or ‘drinks’, and thereby cause
problems for ethno semantics, the
enterprise can be saved, so it is said, by
invoking polysemy.
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
That is, in (1) the contradiction would be
resolved in some such fashion as this:
allow ‘book’ to have (at least) two senses,
namely that
(a)in which it includes hardback and
paperback books, and that
(b) in which it means hardback books and
so contrasts with paperbacks; conclude
that thereby the second sense is the one
relevant here..
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
(2) either the dictionary
specification for ‘a coffee’ is
allowed to include an additional
sense, namely something like ‘a
snack’ (though this seems highly
implausible), or the domain of
‘food’ or ‘something to eat’
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
(Frake 1969: 31–2) is so constructed to
allow for ‘food1’ to include both ‘food2’
and ‘drinks’.

Here the analyst could appeal to the

familiar condition of the head term of a
taxonomy also being a category label at a
lower level of contrast.
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
…‘the fact that distinctions of sense can be
multiplied indefinitely’ (Lyons 1977: 554

This captures neither the point of dictionaries

nor, crucially, how members, including
professional ethnographers, decide what the
terms in (1) and (2) mean and how they mean
what they do, ‘how’ and ‘what’ being, of
course, inseparable.
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
Thus in
(1) one can take it that a person viewing the sign can
discover (literally) in the (findable) fact that a book sale
is being advertised by the sign, that whereas some sales
are of paperbacks only, and some of hardbacks only,
this sale is of both; moreover, that fact is something that
a bookshop having a sale might be interested in having
the people seeing the sign, that is its (now) potential
customers, be aware of, because as anybody knows who
looks in bookshop windows, different if overlapping
sets of customers are interested in paperbacks and
hardbacks.
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
…the fundamental problem is philosophical, a matter
of the nature and use of the concept of language
being employed.

The idea that language, culture, and society are

objects the nature of which can be discovered and
elucidated by the formal, rational, scientific,
analytical, abstracted methods of what Garfinkel
(2002: 65–8, 121) called the ‘worldwide social science
movement’ is, in Ryle’s terms, a category mistake of
the first order (Winch 1970 [1964]: 93).
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
Indeed it is a monumental mistake that
continues to mislead the respective disciplines
that subscribe to it (Hutchinson, Read, and
Sharrock 2008; Winch [1958] 2008).

It is a mistake because it mis-takes from the

outset the way language – and thereby the
concepts that are expressed in it, including
‘language’, ‘culture’, and ‘society’ – operates.
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
It entails a failure to appreciate that the
home of language, culture, and society is in
social interaction
(Watson 1992: 2), in the mutually
coordinated actions of human beings going
about the business of their everyday affairs
(whether commonplace or esoteric),
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
Schegloff (2007: 264) calls ‘the
observable, actual conduct in interaction that is
the prima facie, bottom-line stuff of social life’;
that what a linguistic expression or any other
sign or movement signifies is to be found in the
situated, occasioned, interactional context that
constitutes it as such (Coulter 2009: 391);
 Language, Culture, and
Interaction
Therefore what language primarily does is
not to describe things, this being the constative
or descriptive fallacy (Austin 1965: 3), and
certainly not to describe some imagined-to-be
independent realm of reality outside of
language, but to be the means and medium for
performing actions, including describing and
those other actions that incorporate
descriptions.
 Language, culture, and
interaction: describing identity

I am British, from Kitchener, North American,

European, from Cherry Park, English Canadian,
from Liverpool, Ontarian, from Lancashire,
Canadian, from Huyton, from the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
an easterner, from Central Canada, from
Lancashire, from south-western Ontario.

Who am I?
 Language, culture, and
interaction: describing identity

These are all not only correct

descriptions of who I am but, more
importantly, identifications
useable for the interactional
context in which they are invoked
and which they invoke
(Coulter 1991: 41; Schegloff 1972: 81).
 Language, culture, and
interaction: describing identity

The point of the identification

selection is interactional, that
is social in Weber’s primordial
sense
– it takes into account the
presence of others.
5. Language, culture, and
interaction: describing identity

Geographical identifications
Adding in all the other possible
ways of identifying oneself – an
indefinitely large number – is,
however, not to conjure up the
existential metaphysics of
personal identity.
 New directions?
he ‘New’ Feminist Conversation Analysis

In the last fifteen years a ‘new’

feminist conversation analysis has
emerged focused on examining gender
as a property of social interactionrather
than of individuals (Stokoe 2000: 553),
while remaining committed to feminist
principles.
 New directions?
The ‘New’ Feminist
Conversation Analysis
Virtually all the talk on which the
classic findings of conversation
analysis (CA) are based is produced
by heterosexuals, who reproduce in
their talk a normative taken-for
granted heterosexual world.
 New directions?
he ‘New’ Feminist Conversation Analysis

A distinctive feature of these

‘displays’ of heterosexuality is that
they are not usually oriented to as
such by either speaker or recipient.
Rather, heterosexuality is taken for
granted as an unquestioned and
unnoticed part of their life worlds.
 New directions?
The ‘New’ Feminist Conversation
Analysis
A distinctive feature of these
‘displays’ of heterosexuality is that
they are not usually oriented to as such
by either speaker or recipient. Rather,
heterosexuality is taken for granted as
an unquestioned and unnoticed part of
their life worlds.