Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space Among the Maya

Hanks, William F.

ISBN 10: 0226315460 / ISBN 13: 9780226315461

Published by Univ. of Chicago, 1990

About this Item

First softcover edition. Size: Octavo (standard book size). 580 pages. Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. No foxing in this copy. Edges very slightly spotted or marked. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: 1-2 kilos. Category: Language & Linguistics; Anthropology. ISBN: 0226315460. ISBN/EAN: 9780226315461. All our pictures shown here are of the actual item, not stock photos. Inventory No: 30036: Cabinet 6 This book is extra heavy, and may involve extra shipping charges to some countries. For further info on this title, click on the "Contact Seller" button within this listing. We will try to reply within 24 hours. Otherwise you can order right now (inclusive of shipping options) from the "Add to Basket" button to the right. Seller Inventory # 30036

Bibliographic Details

Title: Referential Practice: Language and Lived ...

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Publication Date: 1990

Binding: Softcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Referential Practice is an anthropological study of language use in a contemporary Maya community. It examines the routine conversational practices in which Maya speakers make reference to themselves and to each other, to their immediate contexts, and to their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Oxkutzcab, Yucatán, William F. Hanks develops a sociocultural approach to reference in natural languages. The core of this approach lies in treating speech as a social engagement and reference as a practice through which actors orient themselves in the world. The conceptual framework derives from cultural anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive semantics.

As his central case, Hanks undertakes a comprehensive analysis of deixis—linguistic forms that fix reference in context, such as English I, you, this, that, here, and there. He shows that Maya deixis is a basic cultural construct linking language with body space, domestic space, agricultural and ritual practices, and other fields of social activity. Using this as a guide to ethnographic description, he discovers striking regularities in person reference and modes of participation, the role of perception in reference, and varieties of spatial orientation, including locative deixis. Traditionally considered a marginal area in linguistics and virtually untouched in the ethnographic literature, the study of referential deixis becomes in Hanks's treatment an innovative and revealing methodology.

Referential Practice is the first full-length study of actual deictic use in a non-Western language, the first in-depth study of speech practice in Yucatec Maya culture, and the first detailed account of the relation between routine conversation, embodiment, and ritual discourse.

About the Author:

William F. Hanks is associate professor of anthropology, linguistics, and social sciences at the University of Chicago. He is the coeditor of Word and Image in Mayan Culture.