Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings

This is a theoretically oriented study of the pragmatics of Vietnamese person reference (kinship terms, personal pronouns, naming set and status terms). Drawing upon linguistic data from a radically different non-Western society and the seminal insights of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Leach, it offers a critical analysis of the major theoretical premises of dominant approaches to denotation and connotation, to knowledge of language and to knowledge of the world. The study suggests that the pragmatic