Recent scholarship on language use has developed a resurgent interest in the complex interrelationship of language and materiality; given its longstanding investigation of both non-verbal communication and political economy, language socialization research is well-positioned to make important contributions to this investigation of language materiality. This paper advances such a project by demonstrating how the discursive processes of language socialization make the material affectively meaningful. Through an exploration of prompting interactions in cross-border conversations within transnational Salvadoran families, the paper elucidates how processes of material-affective semiosis produce subject positions that are made normative for some individuals, in this case, differentiating between migrant and non-migrant kin. Drawing out the role of materiality in such processes thus reveals how language socialization functions as a scale-making resource that turns the inequalities of transnational migration into constitutive features of family life.
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2020. Cross-border Communication and the Enregisterment of Collective Frameworks for Care. Medical Anthropology 39:7 ► pp. 624 ff.
Arnold, Lynnette
2021. Communication as Care across Borders: Forging and Co‐Opting Relationships of Obligation in Transnational Salvadoran Families. American Anthropologist 123:1 ► pp. 137 ff.
de León, Lourdes & Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez
2021. Language Socialization at the Intersection of the Local and the Global: The Contested Trajectories of Input and Communicative Competence. Annual Review of Linguistics 7:1 ► pp. 421 ff.
Ruiz-Eugenio, Laura, Ana Toledo del Cerro, Jim Crowther & Guiomar Merodio
2021. Making Choices in Discourse: New Alternative Masculinities Opposing the “Warrior’s Rest”. Frontiers in Psychology 12
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