“Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus
Author(s)
Silverstein, Michael
Abstract
Events of language use mediate human sociality. Such semiotic occasions develop, sustain, or transform at least part–some have argued the greater part–of people’s conceptualizations of their universe. Reserving the term cultural concepts for such sociocentric aspects of human cognition, this article sketches linguistic anthropology’s methods for discovering truly cultural conceptualizations, illustrated at the polar extremes of ritual efficacy (Christianity’s Eucharistic liturgy) and of everyday conversational language games. Knowledge schemata structuring cultural concepts, here termed -onomic knowledge, turn out to be “in play” in interaction, made relevant to it as interactants use verbal and perilinguistic signs in the work of aligning as relationally identifiable kinds of persons.
