This short concluding chapter offers a brief conclusion that highlights key achievements of the book.

This chapter recasts prescription in terms of design. Prescription has been of long-standing interest in logic, rhetoric, and dialectic. However, prescription is often narrowly cast such that it misses how context for argumentation is deliberately constructed. It is argued here that there can be design for argumentative polylogue that is more deliberate than the routine inventiveness evident in ordinary communication. This design work is not simply about particular inventions-for and discoveries-about positions, players, and places for argument but about assembling polylogues to produce particular argumentative discourse. Social media platforms are critically engaged to explore this point and to consider more generally the practical design theorizing involved in constructing argumentative polylogues. Argumentative design is shown to be best understood as an architectonic productive art for producing argumentative discourse that experiments with what is possible, plausible, probable, and preferable for disagreement management. It is work that is organized by a fundamental design question: what disagreement(s) to have (if any)? To further understand the designability of polylogical interaction for argumentative conduct, and the contestability of its design, additional contemporary cases in policy, deliberative democracy, and critical infrastructures are used to articulate communicative imagination, design languages, and critical thinking for polylogical argumentative design.

This chapter presents the motivation and methodology of a cross-linguistic and cross-generational study of DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages. Innovative aspects of this project are the comparison of the same linguistic phenomenon cross-linguistically and in heritage languages that share the same majority language context and the inclusion of adult first generation immigrants to examine the cross-generational component. By including heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants as well as two generations of native speakers in the homeland, we examine whether changes with DOM are observed in both diaspora and homeland contexts, or only in the diaspora context. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the linguistic and situational factors that contribute to DOM erosion within and across languages. The rest of this chapter presents the research questions, more specific hypotheses and the overall methodology.

This chapter formulates the basic problem addressed in this book: how to understand the complexity of argumentation, that is, how argument and communication are entangled in human activity. Polylogue is introduced as a simple yet perspicuous term for renewing and advancing inquiry of argumentation in complex communication. The fact that polylogue cannot be dismissed is evident in examples of managing disagreement under polylogical conditions both contemporary (e.g., social media platforms) and historical (e.g., establishing congressional representation for the newly formed US republic). While recognized in practice, however, polylogue is theoretically dismissed by an analytic strategy of dyadic reduction prominent across time in the study of argumentation and communication. Even the remarkable theoretical and methodological contributions of the twentieth-century revival of the study of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, do not yet make a polylogical turn for understanding argumentation due to lingering commitments to a paradigmatic norm of dyadic interaction. However, much broader considerations of how argument happens stimulated by this revival provide starting points for a polylogical alternative.

We experience social life through the central medium of verbal messages. What coordination we achieve with others depends upon the fact that we talk to each other; we write and read in graphic forms; we manually sign (as well as gesture) in the visual channel. But what do we know about how verbal messages really work? No matter what your English composition teacher might have told you, I think linguistic anthropologists have developed new light to shed on the matter.

This chapter exposes the received dyadic model of communication and then critically analyzes the presumptions of the model. This reductive model, which views communication as evolving from a basic unit of face-to-face dialogue between two people, has dominated understanding of communication from ancient dialectic to today’s speech act theory, conversation analysis, and argumentation theory – the disciplines discussed in the chapter. While the dyadic reduction has a long, important history in theorizing argumentation and communication – a history that is briefly recounted, going back to the dialectical roots of argumentation theory – the principle of reduction becomes unjustified reductionism that bypasses polylogical realities of argumentation and communication.

The results of this study have implications for our theoretical linguistic models of native speaker knowledge, and to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition, transmission, and diachronic language change. Implications for language policies and the education of minority language speakers in the United States are discussed.

Native Speakers, Interrupted aims to advance our understanding of heritage language development and change. It is argued that heritage language speakers also qualify as potential agents of diachronic language change of the diasporic variety of their language in the language contact situation. Heritage speakers are early bilinguals born with the cognitive ability to learn two or more languages fully and indeed retain native ability in specific grammatical areas of the heritage language due to their early exposure to the language. They are native speakers because exposed to their home language from birth implicitly in a naturalistic setting, in a family environment where the language was spoken. However, insufficient input and infrequent use of the heritage language during late childhood and adolescence interrupts the healthy development of the heritage language, profoundly affecting heritage speakers’ command of specific aspects of their grammar, such as vocabulary, morphosyntax and other linguistic interfaces. What is interrupted in this case is not the language as a whole, as several have proposed, but the individual language acquisition process itself, so that specific aspects of the heritage language, in some individuals, in some languages, and under some circumstances, show significant synchronic variability.

As readers of Michael Silverstein’s works know, his published papers are always carefully annotated with the places they have been delivered as “talks,” the persons who invited him to speak or write, and the thanks to those who commented and contributed in different ways to the finished product. Tragically, he cannot append that form of acknowledgment to this book. Michael Silverstein died in July 2020, after a year of illness and in the midst of editing and polishing the manuscript of this book. To follow his usual practice of providing a natural history of this text seems a fitting form of acknowledgment to those devoted colleagues who participated in bringing this book to publication.

This chapter presents three descriptive analyses of polylogue that draw on three different types of text. Each text – corporate advertorial, news account, and editorial – concerns argumentation about energy production and environmental protection. Using a corporate advertorial previously analyzed by other argumentation scholars, the first polylogical analysis explains key analytic costs born from the practice of making dyadic reductions when reconstructing and analyzing argumentation. The second illustrates the reconstruction of a controversy from a news story that produces a macroscopic representation of the polylogical disagreement management to describe the argumentative relations among players, positions, and places. The third articulates the argumentative strategy of an editorial to manage the polylogical circumstances of its production while offering a novel interpretation about how the strategy seeks to redesign the very polylogue that gave rise to the editorial. These polylogical reconstructions and analyses of argumentation show how to account for the argumentative organization of positions, players, and places involved in the complex practices of disagreement management.

What do we know about the universe? And why? In particular, what are the categories of knowledge, the principles by which we recognize phenomena – for example, phenomena of perception – and by which we imagine things and situations in imaginary universes? How much of that knowledge is somehow reflected in, or reflects, language and/or discourse? How, then, do we communicate and share that knowledge? How much of the knowledge that language codes is universal in some sense, and how much is socio-historically specific? To answer these questions we need a revision of the account of language as handed down to us by Western philosophy, arguably as early as Plato’s Cratylus and continuing into the post-Enlightenment theories of language.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.