27 June – 2 July 2021
Winterthur, Switzerland
https://ipra2021.exordo.com
Organizer: Scott Kiesling (kiesling@pitt.edu)
Discussions of social meaning in language are most commonly pursued through the indexicality of a single form, including the phonetics, intonation, morphology, and lexis of an utterance. But relatively little work in sociolinguistics to date has been focused on the linguistic poetic function and social meaning. One example of such work is Lempert’s (2008) article that shows that Tibetan monks use interspeaker poetic patterns to create stances in competitive speech events. There are also older works that appeal to poetic forms, such as the studies of figures of speech in Tannen’s (1989) book Talking Voices, the most well-known of which is the chapter that argues for the importance of different forms of repetition in interaction. This panel will host papers that show how Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function is used to create social meanings in linguistic form in interaction.
The poetic function is most famously articulated by Jakobson (1960:358) as the function that “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” For practical analytic purposes, the important issue is that meaning is not attached to a single token of a form that is taken to be of a particular type (the axis of selection), but that the form is a pattern across a stretch of speech, including across different speakers (the axis of combination).
The notion of social meaning is understood here to be pragmatics broadly construed. That is, any sort of meaning that relies on indexical understandings outside of the denotational combination of parts of an utterance. These meanings include social identities like gender, class, race, nationality, etc., but also forms such as stance and affect, and especially the link between the two.
Papers in this panel are invited to connect poetics and social meaning in a wide range of ways and forms. For example, some of the questions papers could address with data include: - What is the relationship between indexicality and poetics?What is the relationship between poetics and iconicity? - How are stances created through poetics?Are certain kinds of poetic form enregistered to particular forms and identities? - What is properly understood as poetics? For example, is scale recursivity a kind of poetic form? - In more ‘poetic’ genres (poetry, rap, laments) how do linguistic features such as deixis and variation work together in ways that create meaning that is not possible without the relational elements? - How does metrical structure create affect in language?
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. "Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics." In Style in Language, ed. By Thomas Sebeok, 350-377. New York: MIT.
Abstracts of 250-500 words incl. references should be submitted via IPrA’s submission system https://ipra2021.exordo.com/ before 25 October 2020 (for further instructions, see https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP). The format of the presentation will be 20 min talk followed by 8 minutes discussion time.
Please address all inquiries to the organizer, Scott Kiesling, kiesling@pitt.edu.