Saying and Doing in Zapotec

A multimodal ethnography of language as living process this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk gesture and material culture developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca Mexico Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. <br/> <br/> This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant multimodal interaction are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way <i> Saying and Doing in Zapotec</i> develops a new theory characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.