Speech Play

Abstract

Abstract The creative disposition of language resources; the manipulation of formal features and processes of language to achieve a striking restructuring of familiar discourse alignments. A great deal of conversational speech play is essentially frivolous, yet it serves vital communicative needs, such as establishing a proper social bonding among participants in a speech event. More over, when it is used in connection with certain social and RIT UAL enactments, speech play may acquire a profound or even exalted stature. Speech play is a species of what Roman Jakobson refers to as “introversive semiosis,” that is, language turned in on itself. Speech play highlights relationships among linguistic elements that tend to remain latent in the more reference-oriented uses of linguistic codes. It fastens on the “wrinkles” in the linguistic code, its points of overlap, inconsistency, ambiguity, and anomaly. It draws attention to inconvenient linguistic facts, such as the piling up of lexemes on a single phonetic unit, the dose phonetic resemblance of contrasting lexical items (the French poisson, meaning “fish” and poison, meaning “poison”), or the ambiguity produced by optional deletions in a syntactic structure (“the shooting of the hunters was terrible”).