Abstract

SANTIAGO MARTINEZ, Godofredo G.  and  MARTINEZ GARCIA, Nereida Crystabel. Kojtspoo’kxë’n käjpxpo’kxï’n: ‘taking a break from speech’ in the Mixe Languages Spoken in Yacochi and Tamazulápam, Oaxaca State. Rev. pueblos front. digit. [online]. 2022, vol.17, e536.  Epub Mar 21, 2023. ISSN 1870-4115.  https://doi.org/10.22201/cimsur.18704115e.2022.v17.536.

This paper analyzes two different greetings in the Mixe language spoken in Yacochi and Tamazulápam, in Oaxaca State. It is an initial approach to studying greetings from the perspective of Anthropological Linguistics, anchored in deixis and acting. The study used a general approach to parental theories in order to define what is called a “greeting” in Spanish. These two varieties of Mixe are reported to use kojtspoo’kxë’n and käjpxpo’kxï’n as a greeting (in Yacochi and Tamazulápam, respectively). These expressions are interpreted to mean “taking a break from speech.” Our database links what is expressed formally through a greeting with the extralinguistic conditions in which the greeting takes place. The paper sets forth that the greeting in these two varieties of the Mixe language is a discursive construction of gender that occurs in a multimodal context.

Keywords : Anthropological Linguistics; deixis; acting; forms of greeting.