Volume 31, Issue 4 - In honour of John Gumperz

The article begins by reviewing the early research interests of John Gumperz and their further development across the course of his career. His doctoral research documented spoken language in an immigrant community. He then focused on bilingual speech communities and “code switching.” Later he became concerned with various aspects of style shifting within a language. Whether he was considering language switching, or dialect switching, or shifts in register, Gumperz showed that speakers were creative in their language use — active agents rather than passive rule followers — alternating among disparate styles to communicate metaphoric and usually implicit social meaning. Through changes in speech style, interlocutors could be seen to be reframing their social relations, modifying the social situation they were in. ( NB This lability in situational framing is a major point of emphasis in Gumperz's notions of “contextualization” and “conversational inference.”) The article continues by presenting and discussing two of Gumperz's “telling cases” of contextualizing frame shifts by speakers. In concluding, a few examples from the author's own research are presented, with emphasis on the use of contextualization in establishing local alignments of solidarity-in-the-moment among interlocutors — indexical shifts to a footing for interaction that the author has termed “situational co-membership.”

This article engages with John Gumperz's research legacy by examining his statements regarding indexicality at different stages in his career: the “Introduction” to Directions in Sociolinguistics (1972); a framing essay in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Gumperz, Introduction to Part IV, Cambridge University Press, 1996); and a recent series of interviews and essays in Language and Social Interaction (2002). Situating his evolving understanding of indexicality vis-á-vis other work in linguistic anthropology (Agha, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15: 38–59, 2005; Silverstein, Language & Communication 23: 193–229, 2003a; Urciuoli, Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of race, class, and language, Westview, 1996), I discuss how indexical concepts such as “ordering,” when paired with concepts of spatio-temporal scale (Blommaert, Intercultural Pragmatics 4: 1–19, 2007), provide insightful ways of theorizing and analyzing the dynamics of globalization and language contact. The argument is developed via case studies of migration and multilingualism, based on fieldwork in Belgium (Blommaert et al., Language & Communication 25: 197–216, 2005a, Ethnography 6: 205–235, 2005b) and the United States (Collins and La Santa, Exploring ethnicity and class as communicative practice, 2007; Collins and Slembrouck, Goffman and globalization, Continuum, 2009).

This paper explores the making of academic knowledge as discourse. It reports on the closing down of an academic program based on memories reconstructed through narrative interviews of two professors who organized this program. A narrative analysis of the two long interviews contrasting performance styles reveals differences in response by the two professors, even though their position within the institution is nominally the same. Their tales emerge through the multiple layering of their discourse as moral commentaries of their life and times, albeit from two very different perspectives. The narratives unfold through retellings; the tale shifts to a moral commentary on participants' actions that reveals the longevity of institutionally shaped ways of thinking.

This paper examines “insulting remarks” and “stylized category animations” as communicative practices in interactions among young men with a migrant background living in Germany. On the basis of a detailed investigation of informal interactions among young men in various German youth centers, I will show how the participants make use of these communicative practices as interactional resources to contextualize “belonging”/“association” versus “otherness” in transmigrational contexts. As part of their communicative household, these practices are closely connected to the construction of a cultural identity among these young men. I will argue that focusing on the development and dynamics of communicative practices can provide new insight into the workings of social and cultural identities as well as into linguistic diversity in modern societies.

Using ethnographic evidence on asylum proceedings for refugee recognition from various sources (Italy, Belgium, United Kingdom, and Canada), this paper updates Gumperz's notion of crosstalk by exploring the massively flexible and multilingual nature of late-modern communication as epitomized in one of the most complex adjudication procedures performed by Western nation-states. Every year thousands of displaced people seek the protection of various European countries by filing asylum claims, which are examined by national commissions. This paper explores how the problematic nature of these encounters can be traced to the nature of late-modern communication, characterized as it is by asymmetrical power, multiple communicative agents with competing agendas, multilingual and hybridized talk, and creolized forms of interaction.