Abstract Summary
This presentation discusses examples of metalinguistic commentary and metapragmatic frames around performances of “dialect” in Italian speech situations. Treating dialect as a “shifter” (Silverstein 1976), this presentation argues for the indispensable nature of metalinguistic commentary in both defining “dialect” from an emic perspective and understanding its interactional function in context.
Abstract :
Almost all Italian speakers have a working knowledge of “dialetto” (dialect), and incorporate or encounter it in their everyday interactions. However, “dialect” is a notoriously slippery label for a variety of sociolinguistic phenomena; metalinguistic commentary—made either by the speaker or their interlocutor(s)—is an important accompaniment to such sociolinguistic phenomena and a crucial source of linguistic data in itself. As a nonreferential shifter, an utterance in dialect “code[s] sociological relations of personae in the speech situation” (Silverstein 1976, p. 32), and as a “scalar shifter” (Goebel & Manns 2018) it signals to interlocutors which social scale is being oriented to across a given interaction. Without this emic metalinguistic information, the analyst is left with only a partial understanding of the sociolinguistic phenomena she is witness to.
In this presentation, I contextualize the argument briefly made above via a discussion of linguistic ethnographic data from Italian YouTube videos, as well as from secondary school classrooms in Italy. For the former, I focus on the way that YouTubers’ presentations of self involve abundant metapragmatic work and careful stance-taking around their use of dialect, which they sometimes frame as being at odds with the personae they have cultivated on YouTube. For the latter, I focus on the way that dialect is identified metalinguistically in schools, both by students and by teachers, and how its use is policed via both subtle metapragmatic moves and explicit metalinguistic commentary. The objective of this presentation is to highlight the affordances of metalinguistic commentary—and research participants’ emic sociolinguistic knowledge—in sociocultural linguistic research.
Goebel, Z., & Manns, H. (2018). Chronotopic Relations and Scalar Shifters. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, (n. 204), 1–30.
Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In K. Basso & H. Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55). Albuquerque NM: University of Mexico Press.
