Resumen de The difference intersubjective grammar makes in protactile DeafBlind communities
Over the past several decades, linguists have accumulated evidence for “engagement systems”—a type of grammatical system that has the special role of facilitating intersubjective engagement. Meanwhile, anthropologists and sociologists have shown the many ways that intersubjective engagement is accomplished without special linguistic resources, depending instead on interactional and social structures and capacities. This has raised a question about whether or not intersubjective grammar, as such, really matters. This article addresses that question by examining interactions between DeafBlind people at a time when new engagement systems were emerging alongside new ways of being DeafBlind. Building on more than a decade of research tracking the emergence of those systems, I show how they are deployed strategically for broader socio-political purposes. I conclude by proposing that for a typology of engagement systems, deep ethnographic inquiry conducted alongside linguistic description and interactional analysis will allow us to understand not only how those systems are structured, but why they matter for the people who use them.
