| This work, combining scholarship and research in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, feminist theories, and cultural/critical studies, is a cognitive-linguistic inquiry into the "technology" of alienative and de-alienative language, particularly along lines of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the United States. Highlighting interrelations of agency, emotion, language performance, social identity, corporeal subjectivity, and cognitive rationality, through analysis of selected research I suggest a revision of the cognitive-linguistic conception of linguistic subjectivity, allowing for alienation that inheres at once in social position and in one's relation to language itself. The first two chapters introduce the ontological and epistemological concern of linguistic alienation, as well as the theoretical frameworks, Cognitive Grammar and Mental Space Integration, supporting this study. I examine how we might define such a dynamic sensibility as sociocultural alienation, one that is almost by definition so reflexive that it "contaminates" its own expression in that sociocultural space, removing itself from the domain of what can be meant (Searle). Not accounting for this alienation, I claim, has led to the imputation of a particularly present linguistic subject, one presumably fully engaged in "fugual" linguistic interaction and "hypnotically" focused on the topic of discussion (Goffman), rather than vigilantly moving back and forth between the maintenance of the flow of conversation and the anxious substantiation of self. A case is made for the integrated consideration of affect with cognition. Chapter 3 investigates one of alienative language's salient instances: objectification, here understood as a dynamic process, an often socially inscribed distantiation of some person or group in a representational field that constitutes a movement away from what they desire or would claim to possess---whether beloved persons, abstract humanist rights, conventional roles as agentive interlocutors, or cherished self-identities. Chapter 4 investigates objectification's loose inverse: "reclaimings," or moves aiming for symbolic self-(re)possession. Two case studies, the reclaimings of epithets "black" and "queer", are examined historically and critically. The final chapter suggests how an interdisciplinary approach can enrich a linguist's study of language performances that are ultimately both embodied and "felt"; at the same it proposes deeply reflexive approaches to both subjectivity and objectivity in research. |
