The linguistic relativity of social action

Jörg Zinken (University of Portsmouth)

When?

Wednesday 2 May 2012, 2PM

Where?

University of Surrey, room 06DK02

Open to:

Students, Staff

Speaker:

Jörg Zinken (University of Portsmouth)

Interest in the linguistic relativity of thought has experienced a revival over the past 20 years.  The hints by Whorf and Sapir about a possible linguistic relativity of social conduct have received comparatively little uptake.  Recently, researchers working within the framework of Conversation Analysis have started to explore the specific action affordances and social orientations provided or carried by language-specific grammatical resources (Sidnell & Enfield, in press; Zinken & Ogiermann, 2011).  In this talk, I want to present this new approach to linguistic relativity, and illustrate it with case studies on request activities in English, Italian, and Polish everyday interaction.