Call for papers: Contemplating Intent in Temporal Heteroglossia

[Smith, Andrea L]

Contemplating Intent in Temporal Heteroglossia
Organizer: Andrea Smith, smithal at lafayette.edu
If you are interested, please send an email to smithal at lafayette.edu. Thanks!

Elements of former ways of speaking emerge into contemporary language in a myriad of ways for a host of reasons.  In this panel, we want to focus on the varying degrees of strategy and performance involved in what might be termed “temporal heteroglossia,” the mixing of voices from the past into the present.  A rich literature in linguistic anthropology explores the ways the past enters into contemporary life through traditional performance.  This literature has highlighted traditional storytelling genres (Bauman 1986), the ways bygone days are narrated and framed (Briggs 1988), skilled orality (Tonkin 1995), and the construction of authority in traditional tales (Kroskrity 1993; 2008), among other topics.  In much of this work, the use of specific linguistic features that assist in constructing “pastness” is viewed as resulting from conscious efforts by agentive speakers who endeavor to achieve specific goals. In this regard, we could argue that the past is a resource deployed by speakers as they set out to affect change in the present, and consequently in their efforts to alter the course of the future.

Can we make the same assumptions when we focus on everyday talk about the past?  Certainly many have found that speakers will deploy linguistic resources to evoke “pastness” strategically when linguistic forms are used to index qualities associated with a former era. However, voices from the past may emerge for quite different reasons: when people are talking about past times, terms from prior eras, former ways of speaking, idiomatic expressions and other elements of “pastness” can appear almost as if by accident.  As A.L. Becker has written, "Suppose that, instead of shaping discourse according to rules, one really pulls old language from memory…and then reshapes it to the current context" (1984:218).  According to a “connectionist” approach to cognition (Strauss 2012), it is plausible that ways of speaking associated with former eras could be elicited quite unconsciously when people remember and talk about past times.  

This panel is designed to consider the possibility of several forms of “temporal heteroglossia” and their various motivations. By bringing together scholars on different ends of the performance/cognitive structure continuum, we hope to question the degree to which intention and strategy matter as we ponder the ways past voices enter into present discourse.

Sources Cited
Bauman, Richard  1986. Story, Performance, and Event. Cambridge U Press.
Becker, A.L. 1984. “Toward a Post-structuralist View of Language Learning.” Language Learning 33:217-220. 
Briggs, Charles. 1988. Competence in Performance. The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. U of Pennsylvania Press.
Kroskrity, Paul. 2009. “Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1):40-56
Strauss, Claudia. 2012. Making Sense of Public Opinion. Cambridge U Press
Tonkin, Elizabeth. 1995. Narrating Our Pasts. Cambridge U Press.


-- 
Andrea Smith, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042
(610) 330-5188