Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

458 Part 6: Language and Interaction
• Culture as communication: Approaches include structuralist (Lévi-
Strauss, 1978) and interpretive semiotics (Geertz, 1973), indexicality
and metapragmatics (Silverstein, 1993) and metaphors as folk theories
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
• Culture as a system of mediation: Culture comprises sets of physical
and symbolic objects that mediate between people and their environment.
Language is a critical tool of symbolic mediation (Vygotsky,
1978) and language practices are understood as mediating activity.
• Culture as a system of practices: Replacing generalizing and
abstracted concepts of culture as unitary, stable and ahistorical structures
of meanings and behavior, poststructuralist practice theories
emphasize the constructive role of language and action in concrete
social circumstances. Central to Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977)
is the notion of habitus, a bundle of socially sanctioned, historically
developed, internalized dispositions for institutionalized, routinized
socio-discursive practices.
• Culture as a system of participation: Participation centers on the connectivity
of language-mediated actions to the local and global world,
based on shared cognitive, symbolic and material resources, including
inequitable access and obstacles to participation. Infl uential analytical
concepts of participation (Goffman, 1981; H.M. Goodwin,
1990; Philips, 1972) in situated activities shed light on the local construction
of engagement in discursive practices.
As this overview suggests, a distinctive difference between theories of
culture is whether they conceptualize their object as an abstract, autonomous
cognitive system that underlies observable behaviors or as discursively
mediated, context-sensitive and context-shaping social actions. In a
similar vein, language has been theorized as an abstract, autonomous,
conventionalized symbolic system of internal meaning and form relations
(Saussure’s langue), as competence, a cognitive capacity distinct from performance,
but also as language use in situated socio-communicative
actions, as a form of social practice (Bakhtin, 1981; Bourdieu, 1977;
Vološinov, 1973). With the view of language as action and use, the indexical
character of semiotic systems becomes more prominent: whereas a symbolic,
representational view understands the relationship between
linguistic form and meaning as stable and fi xed, indexicality describes
the fundamental dependency of meaning on contexts of language use
(Levinson, 1983; Silverstein, 2003; Wittgenstein, 1953). As we will see
below, indexicality is a key topic in the study of interaction between
culturally diverse participants.
Based on the discussion so far, we can suggest that the place where
culture and language meet is participants’ engagement in discursively
mediated social practices. To be sure, such practices include the conceptual