prototypical cultural practices; they are historically transmitted, relatively stable frameworks for orienting the production and interpretation of discourse. In a word, they are “institutionalized.” The capacity to produce and detect genres as models for discourse comes from their “framing devices” (Bateson, 1974) or “contextualization cues” (Gumperz, 1982), such as once upon a time for a fairy tale or citations for an academic paper. Such framing devices work to the extent that genres are not so much inherent in the text forms themselves, but in the frameworks and interpretive procedures that verbal performers and their audience use to produce and understand these texts. Genre classifications are not rigidly definable in terms of formal text types, but are the result of applying (sometimes conflicting) interpretive procedures indexed by the framing devices employed.
Framing devices are features of the poetic function (Jakobson, 1960) of language, formal linguistic principles for the enaction of diverse genre types, such as line final rhyme for certain genres of English poetry, like sonnets. Various types of framing devices include special formulas or lexical items, tropes like metaphor or metonymy, paralinguistic features, like drums or singing, and, most importantly, parallelism. This last is recurring patterns in successive sections of text and can be found at all levels of the linguistic system, phonology (rhyme and rhythm), grammatical (repeated phrases or clauses), and lexical (paired words). Genres do not exist as abstract categories, but only as schemes of interpretation and construction, which are enacted in particular performances. Genres can be recontextualized from earlier contexts to new ones with a greater or lesser shift in their interpretation. This opens a gap between the actual performance and the abstract generic model we might have of it from earlier performances. This gap can be strategically manipulated by performers to convey comments about current social happenings or valuations of cultural traditions (Briggs & Bauman, 1992).
SEE ALSO: Linguaculture; Politeness
References
1 Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
2 Bateson, G. (1974). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
3 Boas, F. (1940). Race, language and culture. New York, NY: Free Press.
4 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
5 Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
6 Briggs, C., & Bauman, R. (1992). Genre, intertextuality and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2, 131–72.
7 Carruthers, P., & Smith, P. (Eds.). (1996). Theories of theories of mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
8 Cummings, L. (2005). Pragmatics: A multidisciplinary approach. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
9 Duranti, A. (2001). Linguistic anthropology: History, ideas and issues. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 1–38). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
10 Enfield, N., Kockelman, P., & Sidnell, J. (Eds.). (2014). The Cambridge handbook of linguistic anthropology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
11 Enfield, N., & Levinson, S. (2006). Introduction: Human sociality as a new interdisciplinary field. In N. Enfield & S. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 1–35). Oxford, England: Berg.
12 Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.
13 Gergen, K. (1990). Social understanding and the inscription of self. In J. Stigler, R. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 569–606). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
14 Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
15 Haas, M. (1977). Anthropological linguistics: History. In F. Wallace (Ed.), Perspectives in anthropology 1976 (pp. 33–47). Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
16 Huang, Y. (2013). Pragmatics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
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21 Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
22 Levinson, S. (2003). Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
23 Löbner, S. (2013). Understanding semantics (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Taylor and Francis.
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28 Trudgill, P. (1972). Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society, 1, 179–95.
Suggested Readings
1 Ahearn, L. (2012). Living language: An introduction to linguistic anthropology. Oxford, England: Wiley‐Blackwell.
2 Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
3 Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
4 Foley, W. (1997). Anthropological linguistics: An introduction. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
5 Hanks, W. (1996). Language and communicative practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
6 Kronenfeld, G. (2018). Culture as a system: How we know the meaning and significance of what we say and do. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis.
Aptitude in Second Language Acquisition
PETER ROBINSON
Like, intelligence quotient (IQ), or working‐memory capacity, aptitude is measurable, and differs in degree between learners in any population. Unlike height, aptitude cannot be directly observed, but must be inferred from performance on psychological tests designed to measure it. Higher aptitude for second or foreign‐language learning predicts more successful adaptation to instructed or naturalistic exposure to the second language (L2), as measured by demonstrably faster progress in learning, and in higher levels of ultimate attainment in proficiency
