Embodied sociolinguistics 论文

摘要

Bodies and embodiment are central to the production, perception, and social interpretation of language. In spoken languages, the body is the locus of the speaking voice and the listening ear, while in the case of sign languages the body supplies the grammar for the entire linguistic system (cf. Lucas and Bayley, this volume, Chapter 16), a fact that has important consequences for theorizing language in general as an embodied phenomenon. Embodiment is also enlisted in a variety of semiotic practices that endow linguistic communication with meaning, from the indexicalities of bodily adornment to gesture, gaze, and other forms of movement. And just as bodies produce language, so the converse also holds: Language produces bodies. That is, language is a primary means by which the body enters the sociocultural realm as a site of semiosis, through cultural discourses about bodies as well as linguistic practices of bodily regulation and management. Moreover, even as technologically mediated forms of communication may seem to displace physical bodies as sources of linguistic production, the body insistently reasserts itself in communicative practices in the spheres of technology and the media.