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Maria Khachaturyan is Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research sits at the intersection of descriptive linguistics, interactional linguistics and linguistic anthropology. She describes herself as a committed fieldworker, specializing in Mande languages of West Africa. Her current research project studies language contact, variation and change, with a particular focus on the role of religion in contact and on multilingual language acquisition in the family and in the community.

About the seminar

Title

Doing things with grammar

Abstract

A well-known observation from interactional linguistics holds that the context of interaction is not a given but is constituted and sustained by the very process of interaction. Verbal acts do not only presuppose context for their appropriate interpretation, but speech performance can also effectively create that context. In other words, utterances can “carry with them their own contexts like a snail carries its home along with it” (Levinson 2003: 26). In this paper, I argue that certain grammatical categories—and above all, indexicals—are also part of the furnishings of the snail’s home. Indexicals are grammatical categories which are existentially tied to the context of utterance and index a relationship between specific properties of the speech context and properties of the narrated event. Examples of such categories include personal pronouns (e.g. I is understood as the person uttering “I”, Jakobson 1971), or tense (past tense markers denote events prior to the moment of speech). Their use, in some situations, helps reflect the context of utterance as much as it builds the context in other situations, in which case the speakers can effectively do things with grammar. I argue that the framework of presupposition accommodation can be applied for the analysis of these context-creating uses of indexicals. The theoretical discussion is grounded in a discussion of data on pronouns of address in Russian (ty vs vy) and demonstrative reference in Mano (Mande, Guinea).

Contact

Welcome to contact us if you have questions about our seminars.

Anna Sjöberg, PhD student
anna.sjoberg@ling.su.se

Carla Wikse Barrow, PhD student
carla.w.barrow@ling.su.se