[Linganth] Deadline 10/25: Poetic Function and Social Meaning (IPrA Panel)

[Scott Kiesling]

Hi everyone-
The deadline for papers is looming for IPrA 2021, which as of writing is
still on. I'm organizing the following, for which (AFAIK) there are still
spaces. If interested feel free to submit as described in the IPrA CFP (
https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP), although I would appreciate a
heads up, and feel free to write for more info (kiesling at pitt.edu). Also
feel free to forward widely.
Thanks!
Scott Kiesling

*The poetic function and social meaning in language*

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?

I propose that the panel be organized as two 90-minute sections of three
papers each, with a 20-minute paper followed by an 8-minute question
period.

*References*

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. "Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics." In *Style
in Language*, ed. By Thomas Sebeok, 350-377. New York: MIT.

Lempert, M. (2008). The Poetics of Stance: Text-metricality, Epistemicity,
Interaction. *Language in Society*, 37(04), 569–592.

Tannen, Deborah. 1989. *Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery
in Conversational Discourse*. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.


-- 
Scott F. Kiesling, PhD
Professor
Department Chair (as of Sept.1)


*Office*: 2828 CL
*Mailing Address*:
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh, 2816 CL
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
*Email: *kiesling at pitt.edu
*Web*:
http://sfkiesling.com
http://www.linguistics.pitt.edu
*Twitter*: @pittprofdude
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