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Constructing Collectivity: 'We' across languages and contexts
Edited by Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 239] 2014
► pp. 135–158

‘We’ as social categorization in Cha’palaa, 
a language of Ecuador

| Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

This chapter connects the grammar of the first person collective pronoun in the Cha’palaa language of Ecuador with its use in interaction for collective reference and social category membership attribution, addressing the problem posed by the fact that non-singular pronouns do not have distributional semantics (“speakers”) but are rather associational (“speaker and relevant associates”). It advocates a cross-disciplinary approach that jointly considers elements of linguistic form, situated usages of those forms in instances of interaction, and the broader ethnographic context of those instances. Focusing on large-scale and relatively stable categories such as racial and ethnic groups, it argues that looking at how speakers categorize themselves and others in the speech situation by using pronouns provides empirical data on the status of macro-social categories for members of a society.

Published online: 27 February 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.239.11flo
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Floyd, Simeon
2019. Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse. Gesture 18:2-3 ► pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Floyd, Simeon, Lila San Roque & Asifa Majid
2018. Smell Is Coded in Grammar and Frequent in Discourse: Cha'palaa Olfactory Language in Cross‐Linguistic Perspective. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28:2 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo

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