The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

The
Dialogic Imagination
; Vygotsky,
 Collected Works
, vol. 1; Wertsch, 
Vygotsky and the Social
Formation of Mind
.
26. For early scholarship pointing the way on this issue, see Kurylowicz, “Deictic
Elements”; Prague School, 
Melanges Linguistiques.
27. Contrast this view with the attempts of self-appointed language “purists” to keep
language static (e.g., the efforts of pundits such as William Safire to chastise people for
“incorrect” and otherwise shocking shifts in language use), and you will understand why
anthropological linguists take particular pleasure in poking fun at those who would at-
tempt to police and stop grammatical variation or change. See Silverstein, “Monoglot
‘Standard,’ ” 15. Scholars focusing on how social power issues emerge around fights over
language would add that “correct” usage almost always reflects which speakers in a so-
ciety have greater or less power, status, and/or prestige.
28. When we refer to previous contexts of speaking, linguists would say that we are
speaking “interdiscursively.”
29. Gumperz, 
Discourse Strategies
; Duranti and Goodwin, 
Rethinking Context
; Duranti,
Linguistic Anthropology
. Brenneis has consistently drawn our attention to the role of
coproducers of narrative as well as to the role of the audience in structuring speech, par-
ticularly in legal and political discourse. Brenneis, “Grog and Gossip” and “Performing
Passions”; see also Duranti and Brenneis, 
The Audience as Co-Author
.
30. See Silverstein, “Limits of Awareness.” Creative acts of language use, playing
against past routinized usages, enter the shared reservoirs of grammar and discourse struc-
tures to change them. Thus, a new form of poetry at once draws on existing understand-
ings of what poetry is and has been, plays against those previous understandings, and alters
future understandings. This kind of process is at work all over in the law, in politics, and
in society generally. For example, Victor Turner tells us that Beckett changed the notion
of the martyr in deploying commonly shared symbols to creative new use. See Turner,
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors
.
31. See (Ochs-)Keenan, “Sliding Sense of Obligatoriness”; Parmentier, “The Politi-
cal Function of Reported Speech”; Silverstein,”Metaforces of Power in Traditional Ora-
tory.” This relationship, which is at once iconic (mirroring) and indexical (relying on
Notes to Pages 18–19
231

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context for meaning), means that the discursive structure is an “indexical icon” of the social
or political model it reinforces and instantiates.
32. Silverstein, “Poetics of Politics”; see also Mertz and Weissbourd, “Legal Ideology.”
33. The distinction between “model of” and “model for” was introduced by anthro-
pologist Clifford Geertz, 
Interpretation of Cultures
.
34. This propensity for dismissing usage and pragmatics as chaotic finds its mirror
image in a monolithic focus on decontextual and referential aspects of language as the
primary source of linguistic order. In 1979, Silverstein first traced a cross-cultural pattern
in which there is “a tendency to rationalize the pragmatic system of a language, in native
understanding, with an ideology of language that centers on reference-and-predication.”
Silverstein, “Language Structure,” 208. If this is true, we would expect native speakers (and
sometimes “expert scholars” as well) to focus more on referential units like words and on
semantic or grammatical structuring, rather than on contextual, pragmatic, or creative
structuring in language use. Mertz and Weissbourd suggest that if there is such an under-
lying tendency in our conscious reflection on language, it must be refracted differentially
through the lens of each particular social time and place. Mertz and Weissbourd, “Legal
Ideology and Linguistic Theory,” 282 n. 14. They find examples of a particular form of
this “preference for reference” in Western linguistic and jurisprudential thought, which
(like language ideology more generally) has frequently focused systematic analysis on
semantico-referential, presupposable meaning, while viewing linguistic creativity, contex-
tual aspects of language, and pragmatics as unsystematic and chaotic. Id.
35. See, e.g., Bauman,