Exploring Linguistic Anthropology through Greek Language Selection
Associate Professor Michael Hadzantonis spearheaded a workshop focusing on the Linguistic Anthropological aspects of language selection, organized by the Language Research Center of King Khalid University, on January 16, 2019. The language under study was Greek, using data collected during a study in Athens, Greece, in 2012.
The central theme of this workshop was influenced by the work of Duranti, which indicated that in Italian, the inclusion or exclusion of a subject pronoun constituent in spoken conversation can significantly alter the pragmatics of the sentence. In Italian, incorporating an otherwise unnecessary subject pronoun could result in positive perceptions by speakers toward the referent. However, in the context of Greek, Hadzantonis posits that the opposite effect was observed. This metapragmatic conditioning of syntax resonates with Michael Silverstein's work in the 1980s, where he emphasized the role of 'reference' in syntactic constituents. This is to facilitate either intentional or unintentional positioning of the subject referent by the speaker.
This workshop represents an initial effort in introducing discourse analytic techniques in Linguistic Anthropology. It is part of a series of presentations on Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology led by Hadzantonis, contributing to a broader discussion in this field.
