Thematic description

When analyzing language (use) in society, we have to deal with reflexivity and indexicality – the way speakers conceive of their own and others’ communicative practices, the way they evaluate them, and the way they link them with social positions and stances. The question why and with which consequences this happens is central in contemporary Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology, but it also deeply concerns Applied Linguistics in general.

The thematic, theoretical, and methodological interests and approaches to reflexive, indexical and language ideological phenomena vary across the field. While (the anthropologically rooted) research in metapragmatics and language ideologies usually focuses on how language practices reflexively refer to themselves or to specific contexts of usage, how such meta-references are discursively distributed and negotiated, and how they are linked with the socio-political field and the political economic conditions, studies on positioning practices (emerging from discursive psychology, conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics) traditionally highlight the role of evaluation processes in and for interactional contextualization.

The Summer School attempts to bring these strands together for productive sociolinguistic analyses. Our discussions will revolve around the following questions:

-   What do local practices tell us about social structures and the socio-political context?

-   Why do we want, and need, to understand these linkages?

-   How do we approach indexical and ideological phenomena, methodically?

-   How does our individual research contribute to theoretical reflections and methodological approaches of and to reflexive/indexical/ideological linkages?