Reviews for Verb Movement And The Syntax Of Kashmiri

The average rating for Verb Movement And The Syntax Of Kashmiri based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-08 00:00:00 Ryan Tremblay Culture is a text. Or maybe not. Culture, it would appear, is an entextualization. All of the research projects represented here rely on the metaphorical relationship between text and culture, but none of them are as facile or simple in their reasoning as were earlier hermeneutical and semiotic approaches to ethnographic representation. Here in Natural Histories of Discourse, we are not asked to read from the text of culture but to see cultural representation as itself a frequently derived and contestable reading from the ciphers of sociolinguisticocultural life, where cultural actors are themselves both authors/authorities of culture and the audience or 'readers' of cultural texts. The theoretical machinery employed here constitutes quite an arsenal of critical techniques. All of the theoretical leitmotifs here are based in some variety of pragmatics, sociolinguistics/ethnography of speaking, Russian critique, or post-structuralism. There is a great deal of meta- analysis: language about language, ideologies about grammar, interpretations of long forgotten texts from Sapir's fieldwork, contextualization of the fabrication or dictation of identity, even the native editing of already edited and reduced elicitations of cultural or linguistic data. The 'texts' that are worked over here are frequently polyvocal and necessarily polysemic. They derive their meaning not from their literal or authoritative interpretation, but from how they either manifest cultural context or more significantly become transformed, muted, amplified, or twisted around by context. This idea of meaning is very different from our Western common sense ideas of how language works and what counts as a text. The several papers which deal with a reinterpretation of the speech event are particularly illuminating. When a shaman speaks, is he quoting from cultural expectation or inventing it? When a child is chained to a text that she must read aloud, does she become so absorbed in negating cultural markers in pronunciation that any meaning of the text is entirely lost for her? When an informant edits a text, deleting pragmatic information that seems odd out of context or adding things that would have been recoverable from context, who can be said to be the author of this text? In what way does professional authority trump all other discourse when a child is evaluated in a way that will irrevocably alter the child's identity? Since no text is entirely new, or even very novel, what 'third' person is always presupposed or quoted in even the simplest dialog between speaker and hearer? These are just a few of the issues addressed in this group of explorations into cultural texts and entextualization. I didn't expect these papers to hang together as a cohesive unit, and they do not. But they all share a certain ideology about the power of linguistic freedom over cultural stability/ossification and about the power of enworlding contexts in turn to restrict or channel our freedom of expression. There is more than a little emancipatory rhetoric in these (meta-)linguistic analyses. In the end, the minute details of metapragmatic or phenomenological analysis might dissipate and be difficult to remember, but the language ideology which we as readers of these (meta-)texts are left with has an abiding and welcome value.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-02 00:00:00 Dan Wales A scholarly linguistic analysis of sarcasm!