Language and Social Relations

Citation

Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 24). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book has an introduction, eight chapters, notes, references and an index, in 427 pages. Its chapters are long (from about twenty-three to seventy pages) and build on one another, with frequent cross-references to numbered sections of earlier chapters. The summaries below follow the Cambridge chapter introductions, which are publicly visible, and the publisher's description.

Introduction

The introduction states the book's goal: to explain how social relations vary and change yet remain systematic for the people involved, which in Agha's view requires an adequate conception of the role of language in human affairs. It sets aside folk views of language as a collection of words, as abstract and mental, or as inertly representing things, and proposes instead a view that attends to the materiality of language, to classifications of behaviour that people can inhabit, and to the processes by which such classifications of behaviour and of persons are maintained or changed in interaction.

Chapter 1: Reflexivity

The chapter begins from the fact that in every society some uses of language produce specific social effects, such as indicating one's relationship to the persons spoken to or about or presenting oneself as belonging to a group, class or occupation. These effects depend on context and on accompanying non-linguistic signs such as gesture and clothing, which makes them indexical. The chapter builds the framework of social indexicality and reflexive models of behaviour that the rest of the book relies on.

Chapter 2: From referring to registers

The chapter argues that everyday acts of referring are organised by principles that mediate social relations among speech participants, so that referring is a social act in several distinct senses. In the second half it shows how variants of denotational practice can be reanalysed within a community and come to be recognised as belonging to distinct registers of a language.

Chapter 3: Register formations

Chapter 3 gives a fuller account of register phenomena and how to study them. Registers are cultural models of action linking diverse behavioural signs to enactable effects, including images of persona, relationship and type of conduct. The chapter starts from familiar labels such as "polite language", "slang" or "women's speech" and shows that such metalinguistic labels point to cultural models of speech; it then extends the idea of register to other kinds of signs.

Chapter 4: The social life of cultural value

The case study of the book: the enregisterment of Received Pronunciation (RP) in Standard British English. The chapter traces how RP emerged historically as a status emblem and became linked to a scheme of cultural values, and uses the case to argue that cultural value is not a static property of things or people but the outcome of practices, including discursive ones, through which values circulate in social space.

Chapter 5: Regrouping identity

Building on the discussion of accent, the chapter considers emblems whose diacritics are any publicly perceivable signs, not only utterances. Its main claim is that a person's social identity becomes determinate only through semiotic processes that couple or decouple images of personhood and perceivable signs.

Chapter 6: Registers of person deixis

The chapter treats polite pronouns, forms of address and indirection as politeness, topics long studied in linguistic anthropology and pragmatics. It argues that these rest on a reflexive reanalysis of participant deixis into stereotypic social indexicals, using the French contrast between tu and vous as an example, and distinguishes this from accent contrasts.

Chapter 7: Honorific registers

An honorific register is described as a reflexive model of pragmatic behaviour that links specific behaviours with stereotypes of honour or respect. The chapter looks at registers with elaborate repertoires, structurally developed into large lexical sets and grammatical paradigms, and at how they mediate relations of status, rank and power. Javanese speech levels such as krama and ngoko are among the terms that recur in the book.

Chapter 8: Norm and trope in kinship behavior

The final chapter outlines a reflexive approach to kinship, applying the earlier notions of interanimation of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, enregisterment, normalisation and the tropic manipulation of norms. It argues that assumptions such as that every culture has uniformly shared kinship concepts, or that comparison needs a universal concept of kinship, must be abandoned, since debates about kinship concepts are debates about reflexive models of kinship behaviour.

Key Concepts

Introduction and Chapters 1–2

• Reflexivity: the capacity of speakers to model and evaluate behaviour, including their own, as being of certain types.
• Social indexicality: the dependence of social effects of speech on context and accompanying signs.
• Denotational variants: alternative ways of referring that can come to carry social value.

Chapters 3–5

• Register: a cultural model of action linking signs to enactable effects such as persona, relationship and conduct.
• Enregisterment: the process by which a repertoire becomes recognised as a distinct register, as with RP.
• Emblem and diacritic: a recognised sign of identity and the perceivable features that mark it.

Chapters 6–8

• Person deixis: forms indexically denoting speaker or addressee, which can be reanalysed as markers of polite or respectful relationships.
• Honorific register: a reflexive model associating behaviours with honour or respect.
• Norm and trope: normalised models of behaviour and their creative manipulation, applied to kinship.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A unified framework. The publisher describes the book as providing a unified way of accounting for a variety of social phenomena, and the chapters apply the same small set of ideas, reflexivity, indexicality and register, to referring, accent, identity, honorifics and kinship.
• Broad empirical base. The publisher says it draws on data from over thirty languages and societies, and the chapters include English (RP, Estuary English), French and Javanese material alongside kinship cases.
• A worked historical case. Chapter 4 follows a single register, RP, through its social history, so the abstract notion of enregisterment is tied to concrete material.
• Careful definitions. Each chapter introduction restates its purpose and relates it to the preceding ones, which helps a reader keep track of a dense argument.

Limitations

• Heavy technical vocabulary. Terms such as "metapragmatic", "denotational", "enregisterment" and "text-level indexicality" are introduced progressively, and chapters refer back to numbered sections, so the book is difficult to read out of order or in excerpts.
• Long, demanding chapters. Chapters 1 to 5 each run to about forty to seventy pages, with a theoretical framework that is developed before the more concrete cases in later chapters.
• Not an introduction. The framework presupposes familiarity with basic ideas of indexicality and deixis. It is a theoretical monograph and does not survey the field.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the linguistic anthropology course, Agha's book is the most theoretical. Kramsch's Language and Culture is a short introduction, Ahearn's Living Language an introductory text that treats language as social action, and Stanlaw and Adachi's Language, Culture, and Society a comprehensive textbook; these are the places to begin. Duranti's Linguistic Anthropology is a broader graduate-level textbook on methods and topics. Ahearn's Invitations to Love is an ethnography of love letters in Nepal, a concrete case in which literacy and social change can be traced.

A natural order is one of the introductory texts, then Duranti for the breadth of the field, then Agha for a single integrated theory. Agha's chapters on honorifics and person deixis connect well to the ethnographic and textbook treatments of address and politeness.

How to Use This Book

The book is for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and semiotics who already know the basic notions of indexicality and deixis. Read the introduction and Chapter 1 slowly, taking notes on the definitions, since every later chapter depends on them. Chapters 2 and 3 develop the account of registers; Chapter 4 is the best entry point for readers who prefer a case study, and can be read after Chapter 3. Chapters 6 and 7 suit readers interested in pronouns, address and honorifics, and Chapter 8 in those interested in kinship. Plan to read chapters in order. A good exercise is to apply the chapter's framework to a register familiar to you, tracing what labels speakers use for it and what personae it evokes.