"The father of the wife of what's his name": Aspects of person reference in Datooga, SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 10/02/2017

https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics
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Person reference is a rich topic for exploring the mutually constitutive nature of language and society. How people choose to refer to each other reveals a great deal about the organisation of social relationships in a particular community. In turn, patterns of social organisation influence the types of person-referring expressions available in a given language. Among Datooga speakers of Tanzania, person reference is a complex matter, guided by concepts of kinship, seniority, and gender, as well as situational context. In this talk I will discuss the linguistic resources available for referring to people in Datooga and consider conventionalised as well as more creative uses of the person reference system. One unusual aspect of person reference in Datooga is the elaborate practice of in-law name avoidance, whereby women avoid uttering the names of their senior in-laws, as well as lexically related and similar-sounding words. To avoid referring (or almost referring) to their in-laws, women have developed a special alternative vocabulary known as gíing'áwêakshòoda, use of which is associated with respect. Such sensitivity about person reference in Datooga supports Levinson's (2007) suggestion that circumspection constitutes a third principle of person reference, in addition to the other principles of recognition and economy thought to guide person reference across cultures (Enfield & Stivers 2007).

About the speaker
Alice Mitchell is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Her research interests are in linguistic anthropology, interactional sociolinguistics, and pragmatics, and her work has focused primarily on Datooga, a Nilotic language spoken in Tanzania. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University at Buffalo in 2015 and spent the following year as a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asien-Afrika-Institut at the University of Hamburg. At Bristol, Alice is working on an ERC-funded project that takes a multidisciplinary approach to exploring cross-cultural diversity in kinship systems. Her role in the project is to investigate how children acquire concepts relating to kinship, with a focus on Datooga-speaking children.