Employing Linguistic Anthropology Theories
There are myriad facets of the cultural ramifications for linguistics and its convergence with anthropology. As such, these cultural consequences pertain to people in various nation states and the verbal expression that reflects how people communicate in those countries. The early 2000's film The Italian Job offers an accurate portrayal of certain linguistic tendencies evinced within American culture. Specifically, it delineates certain facets of power within social constructs as it applies to the way people speak to one another. A close analysis of these proclivities reveals that three linguistic anthropology theories -- remaining polite and clear when speaking to others to demonstrate competency as a speaker, turn-taking among various participants, and deploying bald directives as a means of demonstrating power -- abound more than others do. All of these theories are manifest in this film to prove that the leader of the group attempting to steal stolen gold is a suitable leader.
One of the important linguistic anthropology theories used in The Italian Job is the practice of speaking politely and clearly to others. The notion behind this particular theory is that those who are able to do so are considered competent speakers. There are approximately two forms of this sort of politeness, one of which is deemed positive, and the other which is deemed negative. Charlie, the leader of the team that is attempting to steal gold from Steve, practices both forms in the initial sequence in which introduces Stella to meet the rest of his team, which is indicative of his competence as leader of his group. One of the primary ways of practicing what effectively functions as a virtue is by including others with oneself when describing the sort of tasks...
Charlie is unequivocally the leader of this group, and has a substantially greater amount of hegemony and social
authority over the others -- who are essentially working for him. Still, he practices competent speaking by including them in his statements, which underscores a degree of solidarity amongst the group that evinces both politeness and clarity. When he and his team are initially scouting out the residence of Steve, Charlie says, "We need an in to get a video blueprint of the interior" (The Powers, 2001, p. 18). He could have very easily modified this statement to convey the fact that as
team leader, he needed that "in." However, he chooses to use the pronoun "we" instead to include the group in his ambitions, which also reinforces a degree of politeness and clarity to his verbal communication. As such, he has demonstrated that he is a competent speaker and, perhaps even more, the fact that he is in essence a competent leader.
The amount of turn-taking that occurs among different participants is another fairly important linguistic anthropology theory that is readily deployed in The Italian Job to demonstrate that Charlie is unambiguously the leader of his team. Turn-taking among groups denotes social constructs of power. It is evaluated in a number of different ways that involve both qualitative and
quantitative methods. Therefore, it is extremely significant that in the foregoing scene Charlie speaks five times; no other characters speaks more than twice, while one character only speaks once (with just two words) (The Powers, 2001, p. 17-18). The fact that Charlie has more turns to speak than the others implies that there is a preeminence associated with his conversation that outstrips those of the others -- because he is their leader. As previously alluded to, the amount of
speech that a person has is also a significant consideration when evaluating turn-taking. Most characters simply…
