Abstract
This paper explores sociolinguistic enregisterment in two comedy sketches performed by a team of radio DJs. I show that dialect enregisterment works differently in these high performances than in other genres. Unlike the cultural artifacts that have been the focus of previous work, this sort of broadcast comedic performance creates multiple possibilities for the enregisterment of unexpected linguistic forms. Linking locally‐occurring forms to multiple models of speech, behavior, and action, performances like these expand the set of potential meanings of particular forms by linking them with new or additional registers, creating semiotic alignments between different social identities that can be indexed by the same forms. Thus, in addition to describing what an idealized ‘culturally literate’ audience member needs to know in order to understand the performance, it may also repay our effort to ask how actual hearers understand what is going on.Dieser Artikel untersucht die Entstehung von soziolinguistischen Registern in zwei von einem Radio DJ Team aufgeführten Sketchen. Hierbei wird gezeigt, dass sich ‘dialect enregisterment’ in künstlerischen Darbietungen grundlegend von der Herausbildung dialektaler Register in anderen Genres unterscheidet. Im Gegensatz zu in früheren Studien behandelten Kulturprodukten eröffnet die vorliegende Art von Rundfunk‐Sketch mehrere Möglichkeiten für den Einbezug unerwarteter linguistischer Formen in den Prozess des ‘dialect enregisterment’. Da sie lokal auftretende Formen mit multiplen Sprach‐, Verhaltens‐ und Aktionsmustern verbinden, erlauben solche künstlerischen Darbietungen eine Ausweitung des Bedeutungspotenzials spezifischer Formen, indem sie diese mit neuen oder zusätzlichen Registern verknüpfen und damit aus semiotischer Sicht verschiedene soziale Identitäten insofern miteinander verschmelzen, als diese durch dieselbe Form angezeigt werden. Neben der Beschreibung des für das Verständnis der Sketche notwendigen kulturellen Wissens durch einen idealisierten, gebildeten Zuhörer lohnt es daher auch zu fragen, wie andere Hörer die Darbietung verstehen könnten. [German]
Highlights
This paper explores sociolinguistic enregisterment in two comedy sketches performed by a team of radio DJs
Unlike the cultural artifacts that have been the focus of previous work on dialect enregisterment, this sort of broadcast comedic performance creates multiple possibilities for the interpretation of unexpected linguistic forms
Audiences helps us see how performance is implicated in the transmission of culture and language, focusing on the multiple interpretive schemata brought to bear by actual audience members, each culturally literate in a different way and to a somewhat different degree, can help us see how performance can be implicated in cultural and linguistic change
Summary
This paper explores sociolinguistic enregisterment in two comedy sketches performed by a team of radio DJs. Linking locally-occurring forms to multiple models of speech, behavior, and action, performances like these expand the set of potential meanings of particular forms by linking them with new or additional registers, creating semiotic alignments between different social identities that can be indexed by the same forms. Unlike the cultural artifacts that have been the focus of previous work on dialect enregisterment, this sort of broadcast comedic performance creates multiple possibilities for the interpretation of unexpected linguistic forms. By linking locally-occurring forms to multiple models of speech, behavior, and action, performances like these can act as a centrifugal force, expanding the set of potential meanings of particular forms by linking them with new or additional registers, creating semiotic alignments between different cultural schemata that can be indexed by the same forms. Another widely shared cultural schema is one that links linguistic difference with place, so that the use of a variant form is heard as meaning that the speaker is from somewhere else.) Performances can, counteract the focusing, centripetal force of enregisterment practices like
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