L Fleming
Biographic Data
| ID | 143901 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Fleming |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Fleming |
| SIGNATURE | FLEMING L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Université de Montréal |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3776-8390 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Introduction: Indexing Persons
This article introduces the special issue, “Indexing Persons.” In this introduction, we distinguish persona- and person-indexing registers . While the former refers to speech registers that enact social types of personhood, the latter denotes registers whose indexical value enacts and points to individuated entities (social “tokens”), such as biographical persons. In so doing, we engage with the anthropological literature on the person as a cultu…
Western Sydney Migrant and Refugee Youths’ Perspectives about Access and Use of Contraception in Australia: A Qualitative Study
Introduction Access to contraception is an essential component of sexual and reproductive health and rights, yet migrant and refugee youth face significant barriers in accessing contraceptive services. This study examines migrant and refugee youth’s knowledge, beliefs, and experiences regarding contraception access and utilization in Greater Western Sydney. Methods A phenomenological qualitative approach was used to explore participants’ lived ex…
L'évitement par degré: Un Structuralisme De l'Intensité
Les relations d'évitement qui existent dans le domaine de la parenté constituent un problème de longue date pour l'ethnographie comparée. Pourquoi certaines relations de parenté s'expriment-elles en ne se parlant pas, en ne se regardant pas, en ne prononçant pas le nom de l'autre, c'est-à-dire en s'évitant mutuellement ? Les écrits structuralistes sur cette question se sont concentrés sur les catégories de parenté concernées par ces comportements…
Dispensing with Europe: A comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific pronouns
The study of pronominal address in European languages is enriched by a comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific registers of person deixis. In European speech communities, token‐sourced interdiscursivity plays a crucial role in framing the meaning of honorific (V) and nonhonorific (T) pronouns; the pronouns exchanged between members of an interlocutor dyad in a given discursive event presuppose the use of those same pronouns in sequential…
In the name of the father-in-law
In a range of eastern and southern African language communities, stretching from Ethiopia to the Cape, married women are enjoined to avoid the names of members of their husband's family as well as (near-)homophones of those names, and to replace tabooed vocabulary with substitute words. Although in-law name avoidance is a global phenomenon, the daughter-in-law speech registers thus constituted are unusual in their linguistic elaboration: they inv…
The Typology and Social Pragmatics of Interlocutor Reference in Southeast Asia
The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960; Friedrich 1966; Paulston 1976; Slobin 1963) and has developed into a prodigious, and in many ways, fertile literature on so-called ‘address systems’ (Brown & Ford 1961; Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman’s (1960) foundational essay, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” it is perhaps time to imag…
Health Risk Perceptions Are Associated with Domestic Use of Basic Water and Sanitation Services—Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
We examine factors associated with the use of basic water supply and sanitation services as part of an integrated community-based nutrition programme which included a drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) intervention and emphasise findings related to health risk perceptions. Data were collected from 2658 households in four regions in Ethiopia with a cross-sectional survey in WaSH intervention areas, as well as in control areas, where the…
Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism
In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Aus…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
Artificial language, natural history: Speech, sign, and sound in the emergence of Damin
Linguistic exogamy and language shift in the northwest Amazon
The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally…
Accessibility and Responsiveness Review Tool: Community Agency Capacity to Respond to Survivors With Disabilities
For persons with disabilities who have experienced trauma in the forms of abuse and violence, options for accessible and trauma-informed services are often limited. Using a self-assessment and planning process, disability service providers and victim/survivor service providers are able to strategize ways of addressing the needs of survivors with disabilities. The Accessibility and Responsiveness Review Tool (Review Tool) incorporates the principl…
Research Note: Speaker-referent gender indexicality
Haas's (1944) typology of nonreferential gender indexicality attested three basic varieties: speaker indexing, addressee indexing, and ‘mixed’ (or relational) speaker-addressee gender indexing. In an earlier publication in Language in Society this author adopted the same framework for the treatment of a large sample of cases of categorical gender indexicality. However, subsequent review of cases where gender indexicality seemingly interacts with …
Negating speech: Medium and modality in the development of alternate sign languages
With the exception of Plains Indian Sign Language and Pacific Northwest sawmill sign languages, highly developed alternate sign languages (sign languages typically employed by and for the hearing) share not only common structural linguistic features, but their use is also characterized by convergent ideological commitments concerning communicative medium and linguistic modality. Though both modalities encode comparable denotational content, speak…
Australian Exceptionalism in the Typology of Affinal Avoidance Registers
This article systematizes speech registers employed in in-law avoidance into a cross-linguistic typology. Such affinal avoidance registers, consisting of lexical repertoires substituting for "everyday" speech forms tabooed for certain speakers or in certain contexts, are shown to typically diverge from one another in terms of two parameters, their context-sensitivity and the relatively idiolectal or sociolectal character of their register reperto…
Gender indexicality in the Native Americas: Contributions to the typology of social indexicality
This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational ) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute ) soc…
Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity
Cross-culturally personal names are frequently avoided to the point of being taboo. The paper seeks to give a semiotically grounded analysis of why names in particular are so often taboo, and in so doing attempts to shed light on the species of performativity which undergirds the unmentionability of verbal taboos. From the avoidance of names in second-person address to the unmentionability of forms phonetically similar to the avoided name, a grad…
Introduction: Beyond Bad Words
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
Introduction: Beyond Bad Words
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity
Cross-culturally personal names are frequently avoided to the point of being taboo. The paper seeks to give a semiotically grounded analysis of why names in particular are so often taboo, and in so doing attempts to shed light on the species of performativity which undergirds the unmentionability of verbal taboos. From the avoidance of names in second-person address to the unmentionability of forms phonetically similar to the avoided name, a grad…
Australian Exceptionalism in the Typology of Affinal Avoidance Registers
This article systematizes speech registers employed in in-law avoidance into a cross-linguistic typology. Such affinal avoidance registers, consisting of lexical repertoires substituting for "everyday" speech forms tabooed for certain speakers or in certain contexts, are shown to typically diverge from one another in terms of two parameters, their context-sensitivity and the relatively idiolectal or sociolectal character of their register reperto…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
Linguistic exogamy and language shift in the northwest Amazon
The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally…
Gender indexicality in the Native Americas: Contributions to the typology of social indexicality
This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational ) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute ) soc…
Dispensing with Europe: A comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific pronouns
The study of pronominal address in European languages is enriched by a comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific registers of person deixis. In European speech communities, token‐sourced interdiscursivity plays a crucial role in framing the meaning of honorific (V) and nonhonorific (T) pronouns; the pronouns exchanged between members of an interlocutor dyad in a given discursive event presuppose the use of those same pronouns in sequential…
Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism
In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Aus…
Negating speech: Medium and modality in the development of alternate sign languages
With the exception of Plains Indian Sign Language and Pacific Northwest sawmill sign languages, highly developed alternate sign languages (sign languages typically employed by and for the hearing) share not only common structural linguistic features, but their use is also characterized by convergent ideological commitments concerning communicative medium and linguistic modality. Though both modalities encode comparable denotational content, speak…
L'évitement par degré: Un Structuralisme De l'Intensité
Les relations d'évitement qui existent dans le domaine de la parenté constituent un problème de longue date pour l'ethnographie comparée. Pourquoi certaines relations de parenté s'expriment-elles en ne se parlant pas, en ne se regardant pas, en ne prononçant pas le nom de l'autre, c'est-à-dire en s'évitant mutuellement ? Les écrits structuralistes sur cette question se sont concentrés sur les catégories de parenté concernées par ces comportements…
Artificial language, natural history: Speech, sign, and sound in the emergence of Damin
Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity
Cross-culturally personal names are frequently avoided to the point of being taboo. The paper seeks to give a semiotically grounded analysis of why names in particular are so often taboo, and in so doing attempts to shed light on the species of performativity which undergirds the unmentionability of verbal taboos. From the avoidance of names in second-person address to the unmentionability of forms phonetically similar to the avoided name, a grad…
Introduction: Beyond Bad Words
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
Gender indexicality in the Native Americas: Contributions to the typology of social indexicality
This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational ) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute ) soc…
Negating speech: Medium and modality in the development of alternate sign languages
With the exception of Plains Indian Sign Language and Pacific Northwest sawmill sign languages, highly developed alternate sign languages (sign languages typically employed by and for the hearing) share not only common structural linguistic features, but their use is also characterized by convergent ideological commitments concerning communicative medium and linguistic modality. Though both modalities encode comparable denotational content, speak…
Australian Exceptionalism in the Typology of Affinal Avoidance Registers
This article systematizes speech registers employed in in-law avoidance into a cross-linguistic typology. Such affinal avoidance registers, consisting of lexical repertoires substituting for "everyday" speech forms tabooed for certain speakers or in certain contexts, are shown to typically diverge from one another in terms of two parameters, their context-sensitivity and the relatively idiolectal or sociolectal character of their register reperto…
Accessibility and Responsiveness Review Tool: Community Agency Capacity to Respond to Survivors With Disabilities
For persons with disabilities who have experienced trauma in the forms of abuse and violence, options for accessible and trauma-informed services are often limited. Using a self-assessment and planning process, disability service providers and victim/survivor service providers are able to strategize ways of addressing the needs of survivors with disabilities. The Accessibility and Responsiveness Review Tool (Review Tool) incorporates the principl…
Research Note: Speaker-referent gender indexicality
Haas's (1944) typology of nonreferential gender indexicality attested three basic varieties: speaker indexing, addressee indexing, and ‘mixed’ (or relational) speaker-addressee gender indexing. In an earlier publication in Language in Society this author adopted the same framework for the treatment of a large sample of cases of categorical gender indexicality. However, subsequent review of cases where gender indexicality seemingly interacts with …
Linguistic exogamy and language shift in the northwest Amazon
The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally…
Artificial language, natural history: Speech, sign, and sound in the emergence of Damin
Health Risk Perceptions Are Associated with Domestic Use of Basic Water and Sanitation Services—Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
We examine factors associated with the use of basic water supply and sanitation services as part of an integrated community-based nutrition programme which included a drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) intervention and emphasise findings related to health risk perceptions. Data were collected from 2658 households in four regions in Ethiopia with a cross-sectional survey in WaSH intervention areas, as well as in control areas, where the…
Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism
In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Aus…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
In the name of the father-in-law
In a range of eastern and southern African language communities, stretching from Ethiopia to the Cape, married women are enjoined to avoid the names of members of their husband's family as well as (near-)homophones of those names, and to replace tabooed vocabulary with substitute words. Although in-law name avoidance is a global phenomenon, the daughter-in-law speech registers thus constituted are unusual in their linguistic elaboration: they inv…
The Typology and Social Pragmatics of Interlocutor Reference in Southeast Asia
The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960; Friedrich 1966; Paulston 1976; Slobin 1963) and has developed into a prodigious, and in many ways, fertile literature on so-called ‘address systems’ (Brown & Ford 1961; Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman’s (1960) foundational essay, “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity,” it is perhaps time to imag…
Dispensing with Europe: A comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific pronouns
The study of pronominal address in European languages is enriched by a comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific registers of person deixis. In European speech communities, token‐sourced interdiscursivity plays a crucial role in framing the meaning of honorific (V) and nonhonorific (T) pronouns; the pronouns exchanged between members of an interlocutor dyad in a given discursive event presuppose the use of those same pronouns in sequential…
L'évitement par degré: Un Structuralisme De l'Intensité
Les relations d'évitement qui existent dans le domaine de la parenté constituent un problème de longue date pour l'ethnographie comparée. Pourquoi certaines relations de parenté s'expriment-elles en ne se parlant pas, en ne se regardant pas, en ne prononçant pas le nom de l'autre, c'est-à-dire en s'évitant mutuellement ? Les écrits structuralistes sur cette question se sont concentrés sur les catégories de parenté concernées par ces comportements…
Introduction: Indexing Persons
This article introduces the special issue, “Indexing Persons.” In this introduction, we distinguish persona- and person-indexing registers . While the former refers to speech registers that enact social types of personhood, the latter denotes registers whose indexical value enacts and points to individuated entities (social “tokens”), such as biographical persons. In so doing, we engage with the anthropological literature on the person as a cultu…
Western Sydney Migrant and Refugee Youths’ Perspectives about Access and Use of Contraception in Australia: A Qualitative Study
Introduction Access to contraception is an essential component of sexual and reproductive health and rights, yet migrant and refugee youth face significant barriers in accessing contraceptive services. This study examines migrant and refugee youth’s knowledge, beliefs, and experiences regarding contraception access and utilization in Greater Western Sydney. Methods A phenomenological qualitative approach was used to explore participants’ lived ex…
Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Deixis (4 works) · History (4 works) · Indexicality (4 works)