Bloomsbury Academic Language and Body in Place and Space: Discourse of Japanese Rock Climbing

Through a detailed investigation of multimodal interaction among Japanese rock climbers, this book explores a number of significant sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological themes, including spatial frames of reference, intersubjectivity, chronotopic configurations, and poetic formations of talk. Combining the author’s own experience as a sociolinguist and a rock/mountain climber, it offers an account of how climbers’ expertise and affect-laden experience can be illuminated through linguistic methods and theories. In doing so, it presents climbing as a condensed locus of human interactions in which the integrated analysis of semiotic processes brings to light a new set of relationships between humans and their surroundings. Emerging theoretical insights are grounded in an extended and focused participation in rock/mountain climbing activities and interviews with other climbers wherein Kataoka examines the assemblage of semiotic resources including language, the body, and space mediated by their climbing equipment and the surrounding environment. The result is a showcase of highly interdisciplinary multimodal approaches to a climbing discourse analysis in and around the gravity-sensitive zone, ranging from expert climbers’ instruction to novices, gossip and narratives on near-death experiences, to a multi-participant discussion of a critical accident. The findings not only provide language researchers with an opportunity to examine the plasticity of language by showing how language reflects the extraordinary experience on the vertical plane, but also provide readers with an opportunity to learn more about the activity of climbing, which is attracting a growing number of participants and competitors worldwide.