Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Culture 459
and linguistic resources that participants in interaction recruit, including
ethnosemantic categories (Eglin, 1980), systems of person reference and
address (Braun, 1988; Eglin, 1980) or grammatical forms associated with
particular registers and styles (Cook, 2008). But the analytical interest in
practices directs the researcher’s glance away from inferred abstract systems
of categories and linguistic forms and toward the ways that participants
in social interaction engage linguistic and other semiotic resources
to accomplish practical, situated actions (Bilmes, 2008; Enfi eld & Stivers,
2007; Hester & Eglin, 1997).
The scope, unity, and diversity of culture
Some further conceptual clarifi cation concerning the scope and differentiation
of culture is in order. In everyday use as well as in much academic
discourse, culture is commonly understood as particular to a given
social group and as shared within that group. Claims to external (intergroup)
distinctiveness and internal (intragroup) homogeneity can serve as
powerful ideological tools to implement political agendas, from 19th century
nation building in Europe to current restrictions on immigration and
equitable social and political rights for residents of different backgrounds
in many parts of the world. Yet, against popular belief and research traditions
in some social sciences, formulations of culture as exclusively particular
are diffi cult to sustain empirically. As Ochs notes,
Culture is not only tied to the local and unique, it is also a property of
our humanity and as such expected to assume some culturally universal
characteristics across communities, codes and users. (. . .) there are
certain commonalties across the world’s language communities and
communities of practice in the linguistic means to constitute certain
situational meanings. (Ochs, 1996: 425)
The range of language-mediated cultural phenomena by which social
members anywhere conduct their lives is large, and we will have more to
say about some of them in the following sections. They include languagemediated
social acts (‘speech acts’) and activities, narration and reporting
the speech of others. Social identities, relationships and epistemic and
affective stance are indexed through linguistic and other semiotic resources
(e.g. Coupland, 2007; Ochs, 1996). Participation in talk exchanges is made
possible through generic interactional procedures, such as turn-taking,
sequence organization and repair (Drew, 2005). These fundamental interactional
organizations are always confi gured to the local circumstances
and are therefore responsive to, as well as constitutive of, culture-specifi c
social norms and priorities, but such infl ections of local culture do not run
counter to the overwhelming evidence that the procedural infrastructure
of interaction is culturally shared (Moerman, 1988; Schegloff, 2006).