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Linguistic anthropologists argue that human production of talk and text, made possible by the unique human capacity for language, is a fundamental mechanism through which people create culture and social life. Contemporary scholars in the discipline explore how this creation is accomplished by using many methods, but they emphasize the analysis of audio or video recordings of “socially occurring” discourse—that is, talk and text that would appear in a community whether or not the anthropologist was present. This method is preferred because differences in how different communities understand the meaning of speech acts, such as “questioning,” may shape in unpredictable ...(100 of 23980 words)