language and communicative practices
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 14 Apr 1996 17:14:32 -0700 (PDT)
I wonder if everyone has seen Bill Hanks' new book "Language and
Communicative Practices" (Westview Press, 1996). It's basically
a textbook of theories of language that try to bridge the humongous
gap between "irreducibility" (e.g., formal theories of grammar that
posit an autonomous language system) and "relationality" (e.g.,
theories of communicative interaction that emphasize local improvisation
and the provisional construction of meaning). Theorists discussed
include Saussure, Peirce, Morris, Voloshinov, Rommetveit, the Prague
School, Ingarden, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Goffman, the conversation
analysts, and Bourdieu. The book originated in lectures for the basic
course on language and culture for graduate students in anthropology
and linguistics at the University of Chicago; I attended Michael
Silverstein's version of the course circa 1990, and my sense from
reading the book is that Bill's version is just as substantive but
much more accessible.
Phil