Asif Agha
Biographic Data
| ID | 128095 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Asif Agha |
| GIVEN NAMES | Asif |
| FAMILY NAME | Agha |
| SIGNATURE | AGHA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-0068-419X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2038 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Mentalese
It is well-known that metapragmatic verbs exhibit leakage between representations of speech, thought and action, but details have remained opaque. The first half of this paper presents an account of the processes through which they do so. The second half describes the consequences of the existence of these processes (in speech) for social life (in general) by giving an account of how genres of “mentalese” are crafted from locutions involving such…
Norm and trope in social indexicality
The concurrent lamination of distinct categorial principles in speech allows language users to interpret and create a vast range of social-interpersonal realities. Any conceivable dimension of social life – from the mental states of persons to the forms of belonging they exhibit within sociohistorical orders of caste, class, age-set, gender, commerce, or profession – can indexically be linked to features of speech, and thus enacted in interperson…
Tropic aggression in the Clinton-Dole presidential debate
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Money Talk and Conduct from Cowries to Bitcoin
What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is int…
Registers of Communications
In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of communication, through which persons organize their participation in varied social practices, including p…
Tropes of Branding in Forms of Life
This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When …
Tropes of Slang
This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called “slang” or “argot” in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called “slang” has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either ( a ) the refle…
Registers of Communication
T he present volume is the result of a multi-year initiative to bring to- gether scholars from both sides of the Atlantic into an interdisciplinary dialogue on register phenomena.ese efforts culminated in two Register Colloquia at the University of Helsinki.e first one, titled "Register: Intersections of Language, Context and Communication", met during -May .e second one, titled "Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence", met during -May .…
Chronotopic Formulations and Kinship Behaviors in Social History
Reflexive models of kinship behavior permit social persons to establish kin relations, real or imagined, both with persons they meet and with persons altogether elsewhere, and at varying degrees of spatial and temporal remove in social history. Such chronotopic formulations of social relations enable persons and groups to co-locate themselves and kin-like others in place and time, and through these formulations, to participate in collective socia…
Mediatized projects at State peripheries
Large and small scale forms of personhood
Meet mediatization
Commodity Registers
Commodities mediate roles and relationships through discourses that formulate them as social indexicals. Discourses that typify commodities make indexical stereotypes widely known through their own dissemination, thereby linking commodities to registers of conduct. Phenomenally diverse objects (durable goods, forms of speech) readily come under commodity formulations, and many objects acquire distinct formulations in distinct phases of their soci…
Recycling mediatized personae across participation frameworks
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The Object Called "Language" and the Subject of Linguistics
The trajectory of linguistics in the coming decades is likely to be shaped by how it formulates its object of study (whether as language or as some narrowly defined aspect of language) and by the corresponding breadth or narrowness with which it articulates its own epistemic project within the twenty-first-century-academy. This article discusses two epistemic projects that have shaped linguistics in the previous century, both of which survive in …
Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime
The social life of cultural value
My main concern in this chapter is with processes of linguistic enregisterment, processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms. The empirical case on which I focus is a particular phonolexical register of Standard British English, nowadays called Received Pronunciation, or RP. I shall be concerned in what follows with the historical processes through which the re…
Language and Social Relations
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action;…
Voice, Footing, Enregisterment
The social life of cultural value
Register
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Anna Wierzbicka. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 318 pp
Stereotypes and registers of honorific language
Honorific registers are formally discrete but functionally stratified systems, in the sense that an apparently bounded set of linguistic forms allows language users to calculate many concurrent aspects of the pragmatic context of language use. This paper argues that native stereotypes about language structure and use play a critical role in formulating the pragmatic value(s) of register systems. The linguist can neither isolate the forms belongin…
Concept' and 'communication' in evolutionary terms
L'A. examine la maniere dont les differences dans les capacites communicatives et conceptuelles peuvent etre graduees ou calibrees le long du spectre phylogenetique, d'un point de vue semiotique. Il tente ainsi de montrer que les termes de concept et de communication decrivent chacun une gamme graduable de phenomenes semiotiques, meme pour le cas particulier des humains. Sa principale preoccupation est ici de determiner comment etudier cette gamm…
Knowledge in Context: Naturalized Epistemology and Sociolinguistics. Jane Duran
Language and Social Relations
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action;…
Voice, Footing, Enregisterment
The social life of cultural value
Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime
Commodity Registers
Commodities mediate roles and relationships through discourses that formulate them as social indexicals. Discourses that typify commodities make indexical stereotypes widely known through their own dissemination, thereby linking commodities to registers of conduct. Phenomenally diverse objects (durable goods, forms of speech) readily come under commodity formulations, and many objects acquire distinct formulations in distinct phases of their soci…
Stereotypes and registers of honorific language
Honorific registers are formally discrete but functionally stratified systems, in the sense that an apparently bounded set of linguistic forms allows language users to calculate many concurrent aspects of the pragmatic context of language use. This paper argues that native stereotypes about language structure and use play a critical role in formulating the pragmatic value(s) of register systems. The linguist can neither isolate the forms belongin…
Meet mediatization
Large and small scale forms of personhood
Honorification
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
The Object Called "Language" and the Subject of Linguistics
The trajectory of linguistics in the coming decades is likely to be shaped by how it formulates its object of study (whether as language or as some narrowly defined aspect of language) and by the corresponding breadth or narrowness with which it articulates its own epistemic project within the twenty-first-century-academy. This article discusses two epistemic projects that have shaped linguistics in the previous century, both of which survive in …
Chronotopic Formulations and Kinship Behaviors in Social History
Reflexive models of kinship behavior permit social persons to establish kin relations, real or imagined, both with persons they meet and with persons altogether elsewhere, and at varying degrees of spatial and temporal remove in social history. Such chronotopic formulations of social relations enable persons and groups to co-locate themselves and kin-like others in place and time, and through these formulations, to participate in collective socia…
Grammatical and Indexical Convention in Honorific Discourse
This article examines the structure of honorific expressions in Lhasa Tibetan and their contextualized function in discourse. Honorific expressions are grammatically valued items of the language that are indexical of deference toward referents picked out in interactional events. Moreover, the category of referent deferred‐to varies by the grammatical class of the expression. Four grammaticalized indexical categories are distinguished in these ter…
Register
Money Talk and Conduct from Cowries to Bitcoin
What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is int…
Tropes of Slang
This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called “slang” or “argot” in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called “slang” has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either ( a ) the refle…
Registers of Communication
T he present volume is the result of a multi-year initiative to bring to- gether scholars from both sides of the Atlantic into an interdisciplinary dialogue on register phenomena.ese efforts culminated in two Register Colloquia at the University of Helsinki.e first one, titled "Register: Intersections of Language, Context and Communication", met during -May .e second one, titled "Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence", met during -May .…
Tropes of Branding in Forms of Life
This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When …
Mediatized projects at State peripheries
Concept' and 'communication' in evolutionary terms
L'A. examine la maniere dont les differences dans les capacites communicatives et conceptuelles peuvent etre graduees ou calibrees le long du spectre phylogenetique, d'un point de vue semiotique. Il tente ainsi de montrer que les termes de concept et de communication decrivent chacun une gamme graduable de phenomenes semiotiques, meme pour le cas particulier des humains. Sa principale preoccupation est ici de determiner comment etudier cette gamm…
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Anna Wierzbicka. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 318 pp
Grammatical and Indexical Convention in Honorific Discourse
This article examines the structure of honorific expressions in Lhasa Tibetan and their contextualized function in discourse. Honorific expressions are grammatically valued items of the language that are indexical of deference toward referents picked out in interactional events. Moreover, the category of referent deferred‐to varies by the grammatical class of the expression. Four grammaticalized indexical categories are distinguished in these ter…
The Semantics and Pragmatics of Verb Classifiers in Urdu-Hindi
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)
Honorification
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Knowledge in Context: Naturalized Epistemology and Sociolinguistics. Jane Duran
Concept' and 'communication' in evolutionary terms
L'A. examine la maniere dont les differences dans les capacites communicatives et conceptuelles peuvent etre graduees ou calibrees le long du spectre phylogenetique, d'un point de vue semiotique. Il tente ainsi de montrer que les termes de concept et de communication decrivent chacun une gamme graduable de phenomenes semiotiques, meme pour le cas particulier des humains. Sa principale preoccupation est ici de determiner comment etudier cette gamm…
Stereotypes and registers of honorific language
Honorific registers are formally discrete but functionally stratified systems, in the sense that an apparently bounded set of linguistic forms allows language users to calculate many concurrent aspects of the pragmatic context of language use. This paper argues that native stereotypes about language structure and use play a critical role in formulating the pragmatic value(s) of register systems. The linguist can neither isolate the forms belongin…
Register
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese
Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Anna Wierzbicka. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 318 pp
The social life of cultural value
Voice, Footing, Enregisterment
The social life of cultural value
My main concern in this chapter is with processes of linguistic enregisterment, processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms. The empirical case on which I focus is a particular phonolexical register of Standard British English, nowadays called Received Pronunciation, or RP. I shall be concerned in what follows with the historical processes through which the re…
Language and Social Relations
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action;…
The Object Called "Language" and the Subject of Linguistics
The trajectory of linguistics in the coming decades is likely to be shaped by how it formulates its object of study (whether as language or as some narrowly defined aspect of language) and by the corresponding breadth or narrowness with which it articulates its own epistemic project within the twenty-first-century-academy. This article discusses two epistemic projects that have shaped linguistics in the previous century, both of which survive in …
Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime
Recycling mediatized personae across participation frameworks
Preview this article: Recycling mediatized personae across participation frameworks, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.1.2.06agh-1.gif
Large and small scale forms of personhood
Meet mediatization
Commodity Registers
Commodities mediate roles and relationships through discourses that formulate them as social indexicals. Discourses that typify commodities make indexical stereotypes widely known through their own dissemination, thereby linking commodities to registers of conduct. Phenomenally diverse objects (durable goods, forms of speech) readily come under commodity formulations, and many objects acquire distinct formulations in distinct phases of their soci…
Mediatized projects at State peripheries
Registers of Communications
In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of communication, through which persons organize their participation in varied social practices, including p…
Tropes of Branding in Forms of Life
This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When …
Tropes of Slang
This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called “slang” or “argot” in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called “slang” has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either ( a ) the refle…
Registers of Communication
T he present volume is the result of a multi-year initiative to bring to- gether scholars from both sides of the Atlantic into an interdisciplinary dialogue on register phenomena.ese efforts culminated in two Register Colloquia at the University of Helsinki.e first one, titled "Register: Intersections of Language, Context and Communication", met during -May .e second one, titled "Register II: Emergence, Change and Obsolescence", met during -May .…
Chronotopic Formulations and Kinship Behaviors in Social History
Reflexive models of kinship behavior permit social persons to establish kin relations, real or imagined, both with persons they meet and with persons altogether elsewhere, and at varying degrees of spatial and temporal remove in social history. Such chronotopic formulations of social relations enable persons and groups to co-locate themselves and kin-like others in place and time, and through these formulations, to participate in collective socia…
Money Talk and Conduct from Cowries to Bitcoin
What role do forms of money play in social life? What kinds of sociocultural variation do they exhibit? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money conduct in specific times and places? How are specific forms of money conduct recognized and differentiated from other cultural routines by those who encounter them? It has long been understood that money is int…
Sociology (16 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (8 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works)