Stylistic and thematic shifting as a narrative resource: Assessing asylum seekers' repertoires

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to come closer to an empirically grounded view of the functions served by shifting and mixingwithinan intrinsically mixed speaker's repertoire. We shall do this by means of a detailed narrative analysis of a fragment taken from an autobiographical narrative of a West African asylum seeker. In the data a large variety of ‘shifts’ can be detected at various levels: phonetic, grammatical and paralinguistic. Small linguistic details are iconic of general moves and switches in the narrative, the total shape of which is in turn indexical of speaker identity. This provides arguments in favor of an indexical view of code-switching and related phenomena. At the same time, the data invoke issues of the unequal value of linguistic-narrative resources. In the asylum procedure, different preconditions for narrating are brought into the encounters between asylum seekers and officials, different conditions on sayability and interpretability are present and some of the meanings produced or sought fall in the gap between what is recognized and what can be produced. We shall address these ‘pretextual gaps’ in terms of event perspective, resource control, deterritorialization, transidiomaticity.