[Xmca-l] Jan Blommaert - Meaning as a non-linear phenomena

[Greg Thompson]

There is a flurry of threads that seem to be dealing with the issue of
"meaning" and how to conceive of meaning.

I just thought I'd mention that there is a cadre (I prefer "gang" but
alas...) of folks who are doing work that runs in close parallel to these
local conversations, namely the linguistic anthropologists.

One of my favorite is Jan Blommaert (University of Ghent). He has a
fascinating conversation with Michael Silverstein about language ideology
that points to the historical and cultural origins of Western language
ideologies that, imho, are at the heart of the problems about language
instruction that have been discussed on XMCA recently. Here is the link for
that conversation (to access this paper, you may need to join academia.edu
and follow Jan first):
https://www.academia.edu/7654748/Michael_Silverstein_in_conversation_with_Jan_Blommaert_and_Jef_Van_der_Aa
​

In addition, he has a lovely paper on academia.edu that speaks to these
issues as well. Th paper is titled "Meaning as a Non-linear Phenomenon -
The Birth of Cool". Accessible here (again, you may need to join
academia.edu first and follow Jan):
https://www.academia.edu/8208677/Meaning_as_a_nonlinear_phenomenon_the_birth_of_cool

​​Happy to chat more if anyone is interested but I didn't want to distract
from the other fascinating conversations that are on-going (and in so many
different directions I wouldn't even know where to post this!).

Cheers,
greg


-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson