This chapter investigates how scholars have previously challenged dyadic reductions and directly or indirectly embraced polylogue – often simply called “multiparty conversation” – as an alternative ontology for communication. The chapter is divided into two basic parts. First, the varied understandings of polylogue produced in the literature are discussed. This review reveals some key limitations of the extant literature on polylogues and clarifies terminological confusions. Second, drawing from a variety of relevant literature a nonexhaustive but compelling list of eleven polylogical facts instrumental to understanding what is at stake when people engage in polylogues is presented. These polylogical facts extend the framework by demonstrating both what is reduced in dyadic reductions of argumentation while the complex communicative phenomena that are at stake when people engage in polylogues.

This chapter develops the crucial starting points for an inquiry into argumentation as polylogue. A framework is advanced that foregrounds polylogue as the natural state of affairs for argumentation. The framework elaborates how argument is embedded in communication and communication in activity, how argumentation is for communication, and how argumentation is a source of communicative innovation for polylogue. This profoundly social view of argumentation grounds the idea that polylogues are disagreement management practices in which various players pursue their contrasting positions across multiple places. A polylogue framework offers a new social ontology of argument in complex communication that fundamentally shifts descriptive, normative, and prescriptive attention to how contexts for argumentation are made via interaction and how argument is implicated in broader chains of social action and cognition. The polylogue framework thus scaffolds the discovery, analysis, and design of argumentative structures and functions for a much wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions.

Where, indeed, do cultural concepts come from? Whorf was the first to propose a general way of understanding the emergence of cultural concepts, so he will be our main guide as we build on our earlier lectures to see how cultural categories are formed from the confluence of grammatical structure, denotational domains, and the sociocultural practice of using textualized language within broader historical process. We’ll also draw on the work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language as well as examples from the sociocultural anthropology of Stanley Tambiah so as to generate our own account of cultural conceptualization.

In the last lecture, we focused on ritual and ritualized uses of language that seem to bring into being (that is, indexically entail) certain contextual conditions. They do this as a function of the occurrence of some formulaic (that is, densely and rigidly metricalized) linguistic form-tokens. We might say that such form-tokens render salient and explicit a current contextual focus of the emerging interactional text. By interactional text, here we mean the social coordination through which the pantomime of interaction is interpreted by participants along dimensions of social identity and eventhood. In this way, analyzing discourse as the mediator of social life rests on understanding how both big and little pieces of denotational text come to serve as the effective signals of who – as sociological types – the interactants “are” or “seem to be” at every phase of interaction and how they perform social acts. When “appropriate,” such social acts are licensed by who/what the interactants are, and when “inappropriate,” they challenge or make a bid for re-definition of self and/or other(s).

The acquisition of DOM in Spanish monolingual children and Spanish-speaking bilinguals has been intensely investigated in the last two decades. One of the main objectives of the in-depth study of DOM conducted for this project was to confirm and evaluate the strength of previous findings of DOM omission in Spanish-English bilingual children and in young adult heritage speakers. If erosion of DOM in Spanish as a heritage language is indeed a robust phenomenon, it should be documented in other groups of heritage speakers. Although hypotheses about the potential role of the parental generation in contributing to heritage language grammars abound, at the time the Spanish study reported in this book was conceived, there were no studies of potential attrition of DOM in adult immigrants. Therefore, the first-generation immigrant group was included to put the language transmission hypothesis to the test. This chapter presents a brief overview of Spanish in the United States before summarizing the main results of the language background questionnaire, and of the production, comprehension and judgment tasks described in Chapter 5.

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.

This chapter focuses on the performance of impoliteness, through the lens of insults and other mocking language. Impoliteness has been documented as a tool men use to perform masculinity and bond with other men. Disney and Pixar films reflect this practice by portraying insults as associated naturally with masculinity, and often frame insults between men as silly and rapport-building. Female characters insulting others isn’t typically seen as “funny” in Disney, with some clear exceptions, including older characters (highlighting the “sassy old lady” trope). There is also some evidence that the more recent characters of color have more impolite utterances, suggesting that women of color are also an ideological exception to polite femininity. Discourses of masculinity in Disney and Pixar sanction insults as an expression of emotion, but portray more straightforward forms of affection as less common and/or less desirable. For femininity, the opposite discourse is upheld: polite forms are framed as natural, or desirable ways to express feeling, but insults have negative consequences.

This chapter presents an overview of the presence of male and female characters and speech, in each film and across the entire set of films, and discusses issues of representation, conversational dominance, and talkativeness. In the Disney Princess films, male characters and male speech are both overrepresented. While Disney’s branding talks a big game about progressive feminist values, the films still consistently under-represent female characters, and reinforces the expectation that women should speak less than men. While Pixar also overrepresents male characters, at times even more drastically than Disney does, analysis of male and female co-leads showed neither gender consistently talking over the other. This suggests that Pixar has an issue of attention: when Pixar focuses on writing women, the result is a diverse set of talkative, well-rounded female characters with varying levels of power and assertion within their relationships. However, the presentation of femininity outside these one or two characters in each film tends to be much lazier, or altogether missing in favor of a host of male background characters. In films from both studios, male characters consistently take up more space, both in aggregate and in individual conversations, but the framing and characterization of talkativeness suggests that it’s women who are emotional, gossipy, and overly talkative.

This chapter focuses on the discussion of queerness in Disney. Despite the overwhelming propagation of a heteronormative ideal in these films, queerness does exist, at a variety of levels. This chapter qualitatively examines the different ways that queerness is coded linguistically in Disney. This chapter identifies a source of queerness in Disney in many of its queer coded villians (quillians), linked by five key linguistic elements in their speech: playing with register or style, sarcasm and other humorous verbal aggression, wordplay or metalinguistic focus, invocation of femininity (pragmatic), and invocation of femininity (syntactic or lexical). The observed style bears a resemblance to styles documented among cis gay men and drag queens. The implications of the use of ‘Quillian Language Style’ to characterize both male and female quillains is explored, and broader implications are discussed.

This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of directives and the variation in their syntactic forms as related to gender and power. Directives are defined as speech acts in which a speaker attempts to get the recipient to carry out or refrain from action. This chapter focuses on who gives and receives directives, and more specifically on the function of linguistic mitigation strategies and how they correlate with the gender of the speaker and addressee in Disney and Pixar films. The issuing of directives is very common in Disney and Pixar films; because they are an essential plot element, their frequency is unrelated to gender. However, the use of mitigation as a politeness strategy is strongly correlated with gender in both Disney and Pixar, independent of other important contextual variables such as urgency and institutional power (p < .01 for both data sets). In the films, male authority is shown as hierarchical, direct, and aggressive; female authority is shown as subtle, and based on persuasion, suggestion, and collaboration — a pattern which echoes research findings on real-life behavior across a number of contexts.