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3 results

  • 3 - Order in the Extraordinary: More on the Ritual Perspective

  • from Part I - The Language of Ritual: Foundations
  • Dániel Z. Kádár, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
  • Book:
    Ritual and Language
    Published online:
    07 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 37-60

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which the ritual perspective can help the researcher to systematically describe seemingly ad hoc interactional events. Ritual aggression can be a challenging phenomenon to study for two reasons. Firstly, in-group ritual aggression often appears to be ‘violent’ and, more importantly, ‘unreasonable’ for group outsiders. For instance, ritual cursing is normative for certain ethnic groups but may sound menacing for members of other groups, often leading to racist stereotypes and prejudices. A clear advantage of the ritual perspective is that it allows the researcher to describe exactly the pragmatic conventions of such rituals in a rigorous and replicable way, and on a par with rites of civility. Secondly, other less ‘exotic’ aggressive interaction rituals also often manifest themselves in forms that one may describe as ‘violent’ and ‘unreasonable’. The ritual perspective also helps the scholar to capture the pragmatic conventions and dynamics of these social rituals, which are the focus of Chapter 3. As a case study the chapter examines language use before, during and after a ‘grudge match’ in a Mixed Martial Arts event.

Conversations with Strangers

Conversations with Strangers
  • William Labov
  • With Gillian Sankoff
  • Published online:
    19 July 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This Element documents the evolution of a research program that began in the early 1960s with the author's first investigation of language change on Martha's Vineyard. It traces the development of what has become the basic framework for studying language variation and change. Interviews with strangers are the backbone of this research: the ten American English speakers appearing here were all strangers to the interviewer at the time. They were selected as among the most memorable, from thousands of interviews across six decades. The speakers express their ideas and concerns in the language of everyday life, dealing with their way of earning a living, getting along with neighbors, raising a family – all  matters in which their language serves them well. These people speak for themselves. And you will hear their voices. What they have to say is a monument to the richness and variety of the American vernacular, offering a tour of the studies that have built the field of sociolinguistics.

  • Evaluation in media texts: A cross-cultural linguistic investigation

  • LILY CHEN
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 33 / Issue 5 / November 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 October 2006, pp. 673-702
    Print publication:
    November 2004

  • A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies.