Abstract
This paper explores the quest for an account of the ‘total linguistic fact’. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible that is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper proposes a framework based on the acronym SEMIOSIS as one way of grasping the complexity of what is at play, comprising social relations, emotional and sensorial engagement, mobility, Iterative activity, objects and assemblages, socio- and translingual practices, interactivity, and spatial repertoires. Looking at data from a small Bangladeshi-run store in Tokyo, the paper shows how bringing in this wider set of concerns at least allows for a more comprehensive account of sociolinguistic moments.
Highlights
This paper explores the quest for an account of the ‘total linguistic fact’
The setting or scene referred to the time, place and physical surrounds; participants were the speaker or audience; the ends described the purposes, goals, and outcomes of the speech event; the acts sequence pointed to the importance of the order of speech acts within the event; key was a term used to refer to the tone of the interaction; instrumentalities referred broadly to the forms and styles of language used; norms were the social rules that governed participants and their interactions; and genre described the kind of speech act involved
In a parallel space, C’s interlocutor remains connected to the shop while C talks with the shop assistants, takes a photo, and waits for SA2 to bring the “Smoked fish boroda den”. In this excerpt we see an early-evening assemblage of people objects, an expanded spatial repertoire made possible by the use of the mobile phone, various sensory effects and the particular linguistic resources made possible by the simultaneity of these everyday activities
Summary
We have found corner stores to be productive sites for the study of complex social interactions (Zhu Hua, Otsuji & Pennycook, 2017): Commonly run as migrant small businesses (Panayiotopoulos, 2010) they are key sites of everyday economic, intercultural and linguistic exchange. Following the notion of multiculturalism from below, or everyday multiculturalism – understood as “a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter” (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 3) – a focus on the role of small shops from a localised, ethnographic perspective draws attention to the ways in which multilingual cities operate at a local level. This brings together a focus on the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010), grassroots multilingualism (Han, 2013), and an understanding of the interconnectedness of intercultural communication, economic transaction, and social interaction as “contemporary corner shop cosmopolitanism and everyday diversity unfold” (Karrabæk, 2017, p469). In this paper, intended as a research overview, I draw mainly on one example (for purposes of space) that has been discussed elsewhere (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2019), while drawing on other examples to develop certain aspects of the framework
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