Organizing Social and Spatial Location: Elicitations in Indo‐Guyanese Village Talk

Abstract

Boundaries, borders, and the spaces they delimit become meaningful, in part, through talk situated within them, as well as through talk about them. In this article I look at the role elicitations play in organizing mutually embedded knowledge about social and spatial location. Particularly important, I argue, is the use, in elicitations, of metapragmatic framing devices, including personal and spatial deictics and explicitly metalinguistic verbs such as kos 'curse' and kaal 'call/beckon'.