Politics and grammar: agency in Samoan political discourse

This article proposes that we integrate ethnographic with grammatical analysis in order to study the constitution of “agency” in legal and political discourse. Much of the political and juridical process of conflict management in a Samoan fono involves the definition of certain “facts” and the assignment of certain semantic roles to key participants. Morpho‐syntactic elements of Samoan grammar hence become powerful tools in the political arena, where social actors compete by either constituting or resisting definitions of agency.