Abstract

Pick up the latest volumes of any of the leading linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis journals—The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, The Journal of Pragmatics, and Discourse and Society, to name a few—and you might be struck by the broad diversity of analytic practices and objects of inquiry comfortably gathered in each. All will undoubtedly be essays that revolve around an exploration of the norms, structures, and practices of communication and of the ways in which these inform and/or are informed by the sociocultural and political–economic events and forces of which they are a part. And they will do so in ways that span the full analytic and methodological spectrum. Some of the studies will be centrally concerned with describing the most micro-interactional syntactic and grammatical details of contextually situated language practices. But they will be published side by side with others which endeavor to account for the most macro-sociological forces that inform communication and for the degree to which those forces naturalize the differential political–economic power and authority of some gendered, racialized, nationalized practices and of the social actors who use them.