Keremcita: Speech Relations and Social Relations in Highland Chiapas

Résumé

The thesis of this paper is simple, unexceptionable, and largely obvious. I hope to save embarassment, thot my reader swill already subscribe to it implicitly, so that I will not need to argue for it so much as demonstrate it, in the context of relations between Tzotzil speaking Zinacanteco Indians of highland Chiapas, and Spanish speaking ladinos in the same region. There is clearly a relationship between the social organization of an aggregate of people and the organization of speech in the corresponding community. I want to make the seemingly stronger claim that what I will term "speech relations" and social relations more generally are, in an experimental sense at least, virtually co-extensive; that social life is played out and constituted centrally by language interaction. (This is very much like an argument made eloquently and persuasively in a recent paper by Michael Moerman [1981].