The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Language, Thought and Reality
; Sapir,
 Selected Writings.
19. This determinist reading was already part of the Herderian tradition’s cultural
understanding of language.
20. See Lucy, 
Grammatical Categories
 and “Whorf’s View of the Linguistic Media-
tion of Thought”; Silverstein, “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology” and
“Whorfianism.”
21. Whorf, 
Language, Thought and Reality
, 139–140. Thus, Whorf compared English
and Hopi as a way of illustrating how differences between language can affect the back-
ground assumptions with which speakers habitually approach the world:
Such terms as ‘summer, winter, September, morning, noon, sunset’ are with us a
nouns, and have little formal linguistic difference from other nouns. They can be
subjects or objects, and we say ‘at sunset’ or ‘in winter’ just as we say ‘at the corner’
or ‘in an orchard.’ . . .
In Hopi however all phase terms, like ‘summer, morning,’ etc. are not nouns but
a kind of adverb, to use the nearest SAE [Standard Average European language] anal-
ogy. They are a formal part of speech by themselves, distinct from nouns, verbs, and
even other Hopi “adverbs.” . . . These ‘temporals’ are not used as subjects or objects,
or at all like nouns. . . .
Our own “time” differs markedly from Hopi “duration.” It is conceived as like
a space of strictly limited dimensions, or sometimes as like motion upon such space.
. . . Hopi “duration” seems to be inconceivable in terms of space or motion, being
the mode in which life differs from form. (Whorf, 
Language, Thought and Reality
, 142,
143, 158)
We see here the contrasting ontologies implicit in the structuring of grammatical
categories.
22. See Silverstein, “Language Structure” and “Metapragmatic Discourse.” Anthro-
pological linguist Michael Silverstein and literary theorist Jacques Derrida have both
pointed, from somewhat different perspectives, to a focus on words as a form of objecti-
fication. See Chandler, “The Problem of Purity,” for an exposition of the continuities be-
tween these two traditions.
23. See Silverstein, “Shifters,” “Language and the Culture of Gender,” and “Meta-
pragmatic Discourse”; see also Hanks, 
Referential Practice
. For relevant background, see
Garvin,
A Prague School Reader
; Peirce,
 Collected Papers
, vol. 2; Sapir, 
Selected Writings
;
Saussure,
Course in General Linguistics
; Whorf, 
Language, Thought and Reality
; Jakobson,
“Closing Statement,” “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb,” and 
On Language
.
For an overview and introduction, see Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology.”
24. For the uninitiated, let me briefly introduce some key concepts. These concepts
emerge not only from linguistics but also from the broader field known as “semiotics,”
230
Notes to Pages 16–18

---

the study of signs. When focusing on “signs,” scholars are able to study all varieties of
communicative signaling, including but not confined to linguistic communication. See
generally Mertz and Parmentier, 
Semiotic Mediation
. A common analytic division distin-
guishes several ways that language (or signs generally) carries meaning: (1) semantics: the
decontextual meaning that is given by conventional “definition”; for example, when I say
“rose,” you can interpret what I am saying in part because you know that the word “rose”
generally indicates flowers of a certain kind; (2) pragmatics: the meaning that develops
from contexts of speaking; for example, it is pretty difficult to understand the actual mean-
ing or referent of a phrase such as “this rose” without knowing about the context in which
it was spoken (because the word “this” generally indicates things that are close by in such
a context of communication)—thus part of the meaning of that phrase when it is used (the
pragmatic part) comes from its context, for example, from the existence of a flower that is
situated close to the speaker of the utterance; (3) syntax: the meaning that relies on the
groupings of words into phrases, one with another, in utterances; for example, our deci-
phering of the phrase “this rose” also depends in part on the relationship of the two words
to one another and our understandings of what it means to string these two particular words
together in this way (a word of the syntactic Determinant category followed by one of the
Noun category, making up a regular phrase type).
25. See Silverstein, “Shifters” and “Metapragmatic Discourse.” For work that simi-
larly focuses on the social context of discourse and language socialization, see Bakhtin,