Field2007

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Field2007
BibType ARTICLE
Key Field2007
Author(s) Margaret Field
Title Increments in Navajo conversation
Editor(s)
Tag(s) Interactional sociollingusitics, Increments, Navajo, American Indian pragmatics, Navajo, American Indian Interaction, American Indian Discourse
Publisher
Year 2007
Language
City
Month
Journal Pragmatics
Volume 17
Number 4
Pages 637–646
URL Link
DOI 10.1075/prag.17.4.07fie
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This paper examines the use of increments (Schegloff 1996, Ford et al. 2002) in naturally occurring Navajo discourse (conversation.) Navajo is a polysynthetic verb-final language belonging to the Athabascan family, spoken in the American Southwest. It finds that Navajo increments, specifically “glue-ons” (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono this volume) appear in the form of temporal or locative adverbial phrases as well as unattached NPs, as is the case in English and other languages. However, Navajo increments do not appear to serve two functions suggested by Ford et al.(2002) for increments in English: “pursuing uptake” in the case of lack of recipiency, and the indexing of a “stance display” toward the speaker’s own previous utterance. This is not surprising given other cultural differences in Athabaskan interaction which revolve around a value on individual autonomy, with important consequences for language use.

Notes