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Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis

  • Joseph Sung-Yul Park EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 13, 2021

Abstract

Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of time, space, and affect can serve as valuable heuristics for a critically oriented metapragmatic analysis, as it is those dimensions that highlight the material and political groundedness of figures of personhood. This point is then demonstrated through three sample cases: representations of Koreans as incompetent speakers of English in a commercial advertisement, middle-class Filipino youths’ self-positioning through construction of an undesirable elite figure, and valorization of neoliberal future-readiness in a promotional video for a Singaporean university’s student career center.


Corresponding author: Joseph Sung-Yul Park, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Summer School/GAL Research School on Metapragmatics, Language Ideologies, and Positioning Practices, University of Vienna, July 2018. I thank Jürgen Spitzmüller, Mi-Cha Flubacher, and Brigitta Busch for their invitation to the event, and for the feedback they provided as editors of this special issue, which helped me develop the paper significantly. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language for their detailed suggestions. Special thanks to Angela Reyes, who not only provided critical comments for the paper, but also planted the seeds for it by asking me to speak on the figure of personhood at the AAA-AAAL joint session at the American Association for Applied Linguistics 2014 meeting at Portland, Oregon.

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Received: 2020-09-28
Accepted: 2021-06-18
Published Online: 2021-11-13
Published in Print: 2021-11-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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