Abstract
This discussion note is inspired by, and in turn expands on, a few themes and threads laid out in Judith Bridges’s “Explaining ‘-splain’ in digital discourse”. The note stresses the focus and contribution linguistic anthropologists have made to understanding various types of indexical meaning-making practices, and the order of indexicality. This discussion note also briefly details the affordances of the word “explain” and the suffix “x-plain”, which may account for why this suffix, and not others, has come to be used so frequently.
Highlights
Judith Bridges’s (2021) paper offers an ambitious and exciting academic read; it is thoughtprovoking and great to “work with” when addressing everyday interaction in both the online and the offline spheres
Following Silverstein, Bridges moves from linguistic reflexivity, to metapragmatic moments that supply an especially fruitful entry point to the culture-power nexus
It is not just about the reflexivity of language, and and always about metapragmatic entitlements and pragmatic power/force more generally. Addressing metapragmatics in this way, Bridges nicely shows how linguistic anthropology’s terminology and conceptualization from the 1970s–80s, can be so fruitfully applied to contemporary digital environments and interactions. This is the case because earlier than other disciplines, linguistic anthropologists have recognized and called attention to our species’ resourcefulness and creativity, embodied in the ability and inclination for using tools to build other tools, and so on – faculties that are applied to language use
Summary
Judith Bridges’s (2021) paper offers an ambitious and exciting academic read; it is thoughtprovoking and great to “work with” when addressing everyday interaction in both the online and the offline spheres. Explaining “-splain”, is a gateway to understating central contemporary sociolinguistic phenomena, not to mention the oscillations between digital (online) and offline communication practices. Noy. The ethnomethodology of metapragmatics in everyday interaction
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