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Manner of speaking refers to the various nuances of speech and pronunciation. Typically, manner boils down to a speaker’s dialect or accent. But manner of speaking also includes any kind of linguistic variation that distinguishes one speaker from another: age, gender, regional differences, pitch, volume, hesitation, intonation, timbre, reverberation, speed, and so on. What happens to these qualities when they are “entextualized” in closed captions? What happens to meaning, and manner of speaking in particular, when they are entextualized in writing and recontextualized as closed captions? This chapter argues that closed captions tend to formalize speech by mimicking, for the sake of accessibility and uptake speed, conventional written English. For the most part, linguistic variations in pronunciation are scrubbed from the written caption file. What’s left of pronunciation or accent will typically be handled (if at all) by a non-speech identifier. If the speaker is drunk and slurring his words, the only clues in the captions will typically come from the manner of speaking identifier that introduces the drunk speech: (drunken slurring). The captioned speech itself, however, will be perfectly “sober,” so to speak – that is, entextualized as standard written English.

This chapter focuses on the learning process which will offer a social and theatrical context for the further investigation of jingju performances. It discusses the importance of “basic techniques” and the “mouth/heart” method in training actors for a total theatre of “singing, speaking, dance-acting, and combat”, and how they are trained to reconcile the formalized rules of performance with the ability to be creative. It notes that performers are the key to the process; through their lengthy, rigorous, and strictly disciplined training, actors acquire competence in the skills needed in this stylistic theatre. The chapter emphasizes that this groundwork leads the trainees towards conventionalization, the principle described by Li Yuru as “the soul of jingju”, which raises physical skills to the level of performance art.

The final chapter lays out some of the consequences of the discussions in the preceding chapters. These include the importance to the understanding of syntactic structure of groundedness, both of categories and structural dimensions, including the phonological. Negatively, another consequence is the irrelevance of empty categories and structural mutation, any remnant of the notion ‘transformation’. Syntax is lexicalist and structure‐building. It is important that languages be recognized as cultural phenomena of mind, subject to the conventionalization of usage as well as the creativity of the analogizing imaginations of speakers. Progress in our understanding of syntax will not flow from assumptions of autonomy, or of some ‘universal grammar’; what is involved is relative grammaticalization based on grounding. The chapter concludes with an attempt to link the present discussion with the other volumes of the trilogy in terms of their concern with different aspects of the substantiveness of language.

The view of language that emerges from this trilogy is of a system of representation and re-representation, where each type of representation grammaticalizes some extralinguistic mental domain – that is, a system that is radically non-autonomous. Grammaticalization of a particular mental substance defines each of the two planes of phonology and syntax and, within each plane, the re-representations that cumulatively build linguistic structure. The lexicon, including morphology, does not grammaticalize a distinct substance but articulates the signs that unite basic syntactic and phonological categorizations. On such a view, a language is a cultural product whose creativity resides in the imagination that perceives analogies such as figurative extensions and whose usage is associated with conventionalizations. Universal properties of language reflect application of what is common in our conceptual apparatus. Such a view of language, implicit in much earlier work, has been obscured by over-exuberant assumptions of autonomy, the theoretical disease of twentieth century linguistics.

This short chapter provides a summary of Part I of the book. It emphasizes the claim that all aspects associated with usage events have the potential to become conventionalized and entrenched. These include the forms and meanings of utterances, the interpersonal and cognitive activities involved in their production and comprehension, and the cotextual, contextual, and social characteristics of utterances. The chapter also highlights the special role played by pragmatic associations as mediators between interpersonal and cognitive activities and their conventionalization and entrenchment. Forces affecting usage are portrayed as fairly stable sociopragmatic and emotive principles whose concrete manifestations are, however, subject to change.

This short chapter provides a summary of Part II of the book. It highlights the multidimensional contingency of conventionalized utterance types and suggests a pseudo-technical formula for describing how the conventionality of utterance types is a function of onomasiological, semasiological, and syntagmatic conformity within a community depending on cotext and context. In addition, the chapter recapitulates how the conventionalization processes of usualization and diffusion contribute to establishing, sustaining, and adapting conventionalized utterance types. The diverse forms of interaction between the two processes control and modulate to what extent different parts of the linguistic system remain quite uniform and stable or are subject to linguistic variation and change.

This chapter provides a brief summary of all components of the model: usage, conventionalization (usualization, diffusion), entrenchment (routinization), and the forces affecting these three components. It begins by listing the different types of motor, sensory, cognitive, and interpersonal activities involved in usage. Next, it shows how the six dimensions of conformity on the collective level of conventions are related to the four types of association of the cognitive level. Also listed are the three feedback-loop processes—usualization, diffusion, and routinization—and their main effects on conventionalization and entrenchment. The summary ends with a survey of forces acting upon usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It formulates the goal to understand how usage, society, and mind interact to shape the linguistic system and to control its persistence, variation, and change. The chapter provides a first sketch of the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (EC-Model) and explains its basic components and the ways in which they work and interact. The chapter situates the model in the linguistic landscape by formulating the prediction that language is usage-based, emergentist, based on function and interaction, based on domain-general cognition, cognitive, sociocognitive, social, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The terms ‘conventionalization’, ‘usualization’, ‘diffusion’, ‘entrenchment’, ‘routinization’, and ‘schematization’ are defined.

This chapter transports the reader into the aisles of a New England Whole Foods Market, through the stalls of a regional farmers’ market, and into the fields of Scenic View Farm to introduce the challenges faced when trying to understand small farmers’ practices in light of the contemporary agricultural economy. It then outlines dominant theories in the study of organic agriculture, such as conventionalization and bifurcation, which often focus centrally on the market conditions and regulatory environment of the organic sector at the expense of the everyday practices of organic farmers. The chapter then introduces theoretical constructs of good matches and relational work from economic sociology as a means of understanding how small farmers balance market conditions with a host of other concerns in their routine farming practices and economic decisions. Finally, the chapter outlines the organization of the book, which moves from the broader history and context of organic agriculture to the everyday experiences of the farmers at Scenic View, before looking to the future of sustainable farming practices.

In 2000, a radical shift occurred in the organic food system: the majority of organic food in the United States began to be sold in ordinary supermarkets. This chapter examines how the regulatory focus on chemical inputs facilitated the fragmentation and homogenization of organic farming, yielding a conventionalized organic industry capable of delivering food at a supermarket-sized scale. It also examines how these processes limit organic agriculture’s potential to represent a sustainable solution to the problems of modern food systems. This chapter begins with a discussion of what environmental, social, and economic sustainability in the food system would entail. It then examines the concentration of industrial influence in the organic sector in the wake of the federal organic standards, and looks critically at whether industrial organic practices can meet the challenges of sustainability. Finally, the chapter points to theories of bifurcation, which examine structural positions within capitalist agriculture that may offer spaces for alternative farming practices, particularly in places like New England. This chapter also notes, however, that such approaches focus on the political economy of agriculture, leaving the relational strategies alternative farmers use to take advantage of such structural holes unexplored.

Chapter 6 examines acting in model jingju from three perspectives: how it is related to the role-types, schools of performance, and the old form (song, speech, dance-acting, and combat) of traditional jingju. By examining the fusion of selectively adapted traditional practices and newly invented performance styles and techniques, this chapter offers an insight into how performance practices in model jingju are intricately related to traditional jingju, though their associations as seen through these three perspectives unfold in different ways. The author discerns an overall pattern of creation: the deconstruction of traditional practices and the liberty to select appropriate traditional elements and fuse them with new ones, be they borrowed from other performing arts or newly created. In some cases, to deconstruct means to destroy, and to break down leads to abandonment. In other cases, to break down leads to breakthrough; the deconstruction nurtures innovative and alternative practices that embody unique aesthetic qualities of model jingju. This chapter features personal interviews with the performers of principal heroes/heroines and other major roles.

The coda offers an analysis of how the five major artistic aspects work together in model jingju in communicating a particular type of aesthetics. Focusing on the nature and expression of beauty, the author examines three interrelated questions: Did the notion of beauty matter during the creative process? What is considered beautiful and therefore aesthetically favored? And how is this sense of beauty communicated? The author highlights two dominant aesthetic qualities in model jingju: the beauty of the sublime and the beauty of masculinity. The author analyzes imbalance as a primary aesthetic feature in two spheres: gender representation and aesthetic expectations. Finally, the author proposes that the deep roots of the imbalance in model jingju lie in the varied levels of association among the three traditional aesthetic principles—conventionalization, stylization, and synthesis—and each of the five major artistic aspects—playwriting, acting, music, design, and directing, and that, ultimately, the overarching creative directive, the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism, was a flawed premise for model jingju.

Conventional agribusiness and food companies entered the organic market following the passage of the OFPA and the implementation of the NOP, dramatically transforming the organic sector. This chapter provides an assessment of the changes that followed. Organic gained credibility through the embrace of state and corporate leaders and through a growing body of scientific evidence showing the superiority of organic practices in regards to ecological sustainability. Empirical support for the health advantages of an organic diet is still weak, but the perception of health benefits is common, drawing a growing segment of consumers. The organic market flourished during the 1990s and 2000s aided by the accessibility provided by conventional producers and retail outlets. But many activists are critical of the “conventionalization” of organic, and the NOSB, the USDA, Congress, and the courts became sites of conflict over the modification of rules that would further advantage large corporate actors. Given the changes in the organic sector, the question of whether organic is a movement or an industry has come to the fore.

In criminology much violent behavior is actually grounded in existential experiences of righteousness, and is aptly described by Jack Katz as ‘righteous slaughter’, where the actor behaves violently to redress what he or she feels are challenges to The Good. However, there are three ironic consequences. The sovereign’s followers typically act without evidence of psychopathology, evil, provocation, or a guilty conscience. They are ‘ordinary men’ motivated by positive factors (the first paradox) that make it difficult subsequently to hold them accountable with a guilty conscience. The second paradox: the activities which create the genocide have often been ‘conventionalized’ in the past, and treated as rights of the sovereign, and hence not answerable to a criminal indictment. Accordingly, they produce a ‘dark figure’ of crime that is breathtaking in its scale (the third paradox). Criminology has been slow to put the topic of genocide as a political crime on its agenda.

This chapter sets the scene for the two subsequent chapters on usualization and diffusion. Conventions are defined as regularities of behaviour the members of a community conform to because they mutually expect each other to conform to them. Conventionality is multidimensional and not fixed but contingent. Usualization and diffusion are the two subprocesses of conventionalization. Both are driven by the speech chain mechanism, but affect different dimensions of conventionality or conformity. Different kinds of utterance types are marked by systematically different conformity profiles, depending on the dominance of the different dimensions of conformity. Conventionalized utterance types function as implicit and explicit norms. Linguistic innovations can be understood as utterances that are only partly licensed by conventional utterance types. Innovation covers a range from complete novelty to hardly noticed non-salient utterances. Various forces drive and modulate conventionalization: co-semiosis and co-adaptation, identity and social order, prestige and stigma, mobility, multilingualism, and language contact.

Efficiency principles of the kind proposed in this book bring about variation patterns across grammars when they are ‘conventionalized.’ This chapter considers how such conventions come about. A key notion in this diachronic context is that of ‘grammaticalization.’ This term, as standardly used and understood, is extended to include the grammaticalization of syntactic rules within a formal grammar. The ‘adaptive mechanisms’ by which speakers implement new conventions in their grammars are discussed, with particular reference to language contact and different types of bilingualism, and the relationship between these and processing efficiency is defined.