is not just multifunctional, as Jakobson reminded us, but also multimodal. Therefore,interactions should be analyzed as integrated and embodied multimodal practices because even in the most mundane of interactions such as toothbrushing routines, meanings are conveyed and co-constructed by participants by means of multiple modes, potentially including, for example, speech, gesture, touch, eye gaze, prosody, song, poetry, whistling, whispering, and illustration. People may hold language ideologies about which of these modes should be used, or what it means in particular instances to combine one with another. This is because the different semiotic modalities can index different social identities, moral stances, or subtle opinions on various issues. All four of our key terms – multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality – can therefore be brought to bear on this topic.
3
The Research Process in Linguistic Anthropology
How do linguistic anthropologists actually go about conducting research? This question can be broken down into the following sub-questions, which are best addressed sequentially:
What kinds of research questions do linguistic anthropologists formulate?
What kinds of data do linguistic anthropologists collect, and with what methods?
How do linguistic anthropologists analyze their data in order to find answers to their research questions?
What sorts of ethical issues do linguistic anthropologists face?
Since methodological approaches vary greatly within linguistic anthropology, none of these questions will have a simple answer. Often, scholars in the field will make use of several different kinds of methods in order to obtain varying perspectives on the issues at hand. Many of these methods are also used by researchers in other fields, especially cultural anthropology. While linguistic anthropologists frequently borrow from methods closely associated with cultural anthropology, however, the reverse is not often the case – though maybe it should be. With greater familiarity with the tools and perspectives of linguistic anthropology, perhaps more cultural anthropologists and scholars in other fields will see the value of drawing upon the methods described below.
What Kinds of Research Questions Do Linguistic Anthropologists Formulate?
All research starts with one or more questions. Sometimes, these questions are rather inchoate in the mind of the researcher; other times, they are clearly articulated in grant proposals. At the outset of research, however, a scholar must be curious about something – and in linguistic anthropology this “something” usually concerns how language reflects and/or shapes some aspect of social life. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 1, this focus on language in real-life settings distinguishes linguistic anthropologists from many other scholars in fields such as linguistics or psychology who might be interested in language. As a result, the types of research questions linguistic anthropologists ask differ from those of most linguists, sociolinguists, cultural anthropologists, and other social scientists.
The specific formulation of any scholar’s research question may change as the research gets underway. This is also true for linguistic anthropologists because, as will be described below, many linguistic anthropologists conduct long-term fieldwork, often in very different cultural and linguistic settings than the researcher’s own, and such fieldwork can end up challenging the researcher’s initial assumptions. Like researchers from other fields such as cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropologists incorporate insights from their fieldwork into their research questions so that they more accurately reflect the way that the research subjects themselves talk or think about a certain topic. The research question can therefore often be a work in progress.
In Chapter 1, I summarized six ethnographies written by linguistic anthropologists. What follows is a list of some research questions these books and several others address:
How do place names and their use in conversations both illustrate and reinforce important Apache social relations and cultural values (Basso 1996)?
What do the arguments, storytelling episodes, and gossip of African American girls and boys tell us about the gendered nature of conversations and the ability of children to create rich, complex social worlds (Goodwin 1990)?
How does the use of Spanish and English among Puerto Ricans shed light on unequal racial, ethnic, political, and economic relations in New York City (Urciuoli 1996)?
In what ways does the presence or absence of a particular grammatical marker in Samoan political speeches and everyday conversations strengthen existing power relations (Duranti 1994)?
How do minority languages like Catalan come to be seen as authoritative? In what ways are people’s linguistic practices challenging naturalistic ideologies (Woolard 2016)?
What are the multiple meanings of “troubles talk” and complaints, including the special genre of laments, in Bangladesh, and how do they shed light on people’s conceptions of illness (especially mental illness), emotion, and gender (Wilce 1998)?
How are race and language linked and naturalized in ways that powerfully shape everyday life for Latinx high schoolers in Chicago (Rosa 2019)?
How does the use of “Mock Spanish” (such as “hasta la vista, baby,” or, “mañana”) by native English speakers both directly and indirectly index the speakers’ attitudes about Spanish speakers (Hill 1998, 2005, 2008)?
How does a new literacy practice such as love-letter writing contribute to changing marriage practices, shifting gender relations, and other social transformations taking place in Nepal (Ahearn 2001a)?
How do “Beijing yuppies” draw on innovative stylistic resources in Mandarin to create a new cosmopolitan Chinese identity (Zhang 2018)?
What are the causes and implications of the almost complete eradication of a form of Irish Sign Language that used to be used solely by women (LeMaster 2006)?
In what ways does singing intersect with literacy and orality in Mazatec ethnic and linguistic revival in Mexico (Faudree 2013)?
How do spoken, written, and illustrated acts of commemoration performed in and around the visitor books at Israel’s Ammunition Hill site contribute to gendered ideologies of the nation (Noy 2015)?
Of course, these might not have been the questions these researchers entered the field to study since, in many cases, the insights that linguistic anthropologists gain from their initial fieldwork redirect their inquiries in unanticipated ways – an approach that some scholars call “grounded theory.”1 Nevertheless, the list demonstrates the extent of the diversity in topics researched by linguistic anthropologists. Such a wide range of foci requires a correspondingly broad array of research methods in order to collect the appropriate kind of information for answering particular research questions.
What Kinds of Data Do Linguistic Anthropologists Collect, and with What Methods?
Linguistic anthropologists draw upon an eclectic mixture of research methods. In order to answer one type of research question, it might be necessary to videotape or tape-record hundreds of hours of conversation, while another might require sorting through all of a government’s language policy documents over a period of decades, and yet another might require nothing more (or less) than a Google search of the word “mañana” – though in the latter case, there is almost always a deep
