18 Introduction
if they could by themselves embody realms of thought, or as if meaning inhered in
those segmented chunks of language rather than emerging from the active, cre-
ative use of a whole web of related sounds and meanings.^22 Thus, if we are to un-
derstand how language shapes our social world, our focus must be not on mere
combinations of words, but on a complex linguistic structure that conveys meaning
in multiple interconnected ways. In addition, we must take account of the fact that
meaning is conveyed and created by the way linguistic structure is operationalized
in the actual use of language every time we communicate. This adds yet another level
to the analysis. Some schools of thought in essence throw up their hands when it comes
to language use, by implication viewing it as too unsystematic or vast or unimpor-
tant to be included in a theory of language meaning. By contrast, research in an-
thropology and sociolinguistics has elucidated the regularities and processes at work
in actual language use. I will briefly summarize key aspects of this approach.
We first visit the level of language structuring with which the Whorf-Sapir
tradition concerned itself: that of a background grammar or structure to language
categories. Building from work by Whorf and Sapir, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles
Sanders Peirce, the Prague School, Roman Jakobson, and others, recent scholar-
ship by Michael Silverstein and other linguistic anthropologists has proposed an
exciting reversal of the usual ideas about grammatical structure.^23 At the broadest
level, this shift moves us to a greater focus on the centrality of pragmatic, or con-
textual, meaning in language.^24 Much previous work on grammar had proceeded
as if the main point of language structure were to convey static concepts, proposi-
tional information, or meaning that exists apart from any particular context. (A
noun, we can all recite in unison—paying homage to our grammar(!) school days—
refers to a person, place, or thing.) However, Silverstein’s work has clarified the
many ways that the social and expressive functions of language—the contexts of
culture and social relations, of prior texts and immediately surrounding language,
of specific speech situations and uses—are actually pervasive in linguistic struc-
ture.^25 Grammatical structure is at every point responsive to the fact that it is a
system created in use, for speaking, for carrying on social relationships and consti-
tuting cultures.^26 Far from being constituted solely of the static rules and abstract
categories we associate with our old grammar books, grammatical structure can
be conceptualized as the ever changing web of relationships between sounds and
meanings immanent in the millions of uses to which speakers put their language
every day.^27 It is the most social aspect of language, in the sense that it is the com-
mon structuring that brings us close enough that we can find some way to com-
municate our private meanings in a shared tongue. And that is precisely why a view
of grammatical structure as constantly shaped and renewed in crucial ways by its
use in social context makes such good sense.
This socially grounded grammar provides a reservoir from which flow the more
and less predictable acts of speaking that constitute so much of our daily interac-
tion. It is through the creative use of this shared structure that we can forge rela-
tionships, hurt someone’s feelings, rupture the normal order of a meeting, or
interpret precedent in a novel way. But we have, of course, only begun to under-
stand these processes when we have analyzed grammatical structuring, even using
this new heavily contextual approach. Much of the meaning we create when we