Aiming to contribute to the small body of work that analyzes age as not only socially constructed but interactionally accomplished, this paper examines how California second-grade students refer to and perform aged identities (e.g., “baby,” “teenager”) in classroom peer interactions. Through the lens of what they call “aged authority,” the author analyzes how students take authoritative stances by making aged identities demonstrably relevant to their interactions across various types of classroom activities. An ethnographic multimodal analysis combining interactional and intersectional perspectives shows how, through topicalizations, stylizations, (mock) affect displays, storytelling, and ritual insults, focal students take stances of aged authority that variously reinforce and unsettle developmentalism, adultism, and other discourses.

The study aims to reveal politeness strategies used in natural interaction within a particular community group. The article analyses excerpts from audio recordings of conversations of teenage male friends. The chosen interactional approach relies on Goffman’s notion of face and Brown and Levinson’s model of linguistic politeness, ethnographic methods of collecting data, and conversation analysis. The case study continues the discussion of gender and age aspects of politeness realization and communication styles. The article reveals the following interactional solidarity strategies: teasing and group jokes, where participants add details to exaggerate the comic effect; ritual insults, in particular making up nicknames; synchronized speech pacing, even leading to creating spontaneous poetry. In the case of a request, the following politeness strategies and means are noted: repetition of words, both literal and with variations; increasing the volume and varying the speech rate, which express the common emotional state; decreasing the imposition with lexical means, markers of in-group identity; friend’s supporting through an offer and a jokily threat, language game (rhyming and deliberate mispronouncing), politeness marker "please" and its slang equivalent “pazhe”, minimizing the degree of a favour; using markers of group identity (“brother”), offering help and threating jokingly, using puns (rhyme and deliberate change of the phonetic form of a word), and increasing volume and prosodic emphasis that express an emotional state. Participants experiment with communicative strategies, sometimes pushing the degree of their expression to the edge and turning it into a performance. Applying the solidarity strategies in a more expressive and playful way seems to be a feature of the adolescent communication style. The data analysed reveals the local, cultural (and supposedly age) specifics of employing the universal face-saving mechanism of the communication.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how boys use jocular play to perform romantic relationships in their peer culture and construction of masculinities. The analysis combines an ethnomethodological approach to doing gender with poststructuralist-influenced studies on masculinity and boyhood. We demonstrate how the boys – through game-playing, teasing, humorous narration, and ritual insults – do gender while they explore potentially embarrassing romantic experiences. The boys police and produce acceptable heterosexual masculinities while having fun and doing friendship, demonstrating the dynamic and entertaining potentials of performing romantic relationships in jocular peer play.

Abstract Introduced by African American communities, Chinese rap battle features an intensive ritual exchange of impoliteness, aggression, and vulgarity, but its linguistic realizations have not been systematically examined. Taking Iron Mic as a case study, this paper explores how advanced and novice rappers perform ritual impoliteness in Chinese underground rap battle competitions. Using mixed methods of discourse analysis and content analysis, we analyze the ritual impoliteness strategies in 51 rounds of Chinese freestyle rap battles. The findings show that advanced and novice rappers employed comparable instances of taboo language, threatening, and insults on their opponents’ superficial qualities and rap skills. Moreover, advanced rappers performed significantly more boasting and ritual insults on the others’ moral qualities. Their use of ritual impoliteness is warranted by hip-hop community norms of authenticity and creativity as well as Chinese social values of reciprocity, filial piety, and moral educators. This paper contributes to the research on Chinese ritual impoliteness and rap battle competitions.

Background/Context: The popularity surrounding culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is notable primarily within language and literacy content areas but is also making its rounds in other disciplines. Because of its assumed objectivity and status, the mathematics discipline has long been a site of disrupting or perpetuating inequity and thus warrants our focus in thinking about how any pedagogical framework influences the success of Black students. We question whether the ideology undergirding CSP is beneficial to the ways in which we seek to educate Black mathematics learners through a philosophy of mathematics education that prioritizes language, and Black English more specifically. Purpose/Objective: The objective of this theoretical paper is to take a closer look at the shift in education research that has drawn attention away from asset-based frameworks, like culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) or culturally responsive teaching, to focus on CSP. We seek to address how Black children may be positioned by the ideologies proposed in CSP, particularly in the way that culture, and Blackness in itself, is performed. Our goal is to highlight potential oversights in this framework and to discuss whether CSP represents a viable solution for Black students, particularly in regard to their mathematics education. Research Design: We elucidate the genesis of CSP and establish its roots as in tension with a Black ontology by tracing the theoretical origins of two scholars known best for its conceptualization. Findings/Results: Conceptualizers of CSP build on Ben Rampton’s work using the concept of “language crossing” and “styling the other,” to level critiques at CSP based on their studies of ritual insults in battle rap and use of African American Language in schools with multiethnic youth. Although it is true that people engage in language-crossing processes quite often, we question whether these actions of language crossing support claims about the eradication of cultural ownership, and at what cost Black people lose these aspects of culture. Conclusions/Recommendations: There are valuable lessons learned from Paris’s undertaking, but what Ladson-Billings provided in her theory of CRP was a more powerful conceptualization of improving education for Black students across multiple content areas because of the ways in which it forgoes the often conservative stance on language proffered in the theoretical ideologies of CSP. Discourse and language are inherently significant aspects of mathematics teaching and learning, and Black English is one possible entry into culturally relevant mathematics.

This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (whether or not conveying truthful messages), and jocular insults, which are devoid of this intent and orientated towards collective humour experience. Additionally, the subcategory humorous genuine insult is put forward in order to capture the practice based on wittily formulated but purposefully offensive messages commonplace especially in multi-party interactions, such as those available to multiple receivers on social media. Assigning insults to these categories rests on conjecturing language users' underlying intentions, which is a fraught task, particularly with regard to social media data. In order to accomplish it, the form and content, as well as various micro- and macro-contextual cues, need to be taken into account, as illustrated with a sample of insults taken from James Bunt's Twitter and remediatised Jimmy Kimmel's Mean Tweets. An analysis of the two practices on social media also indicates the epistemic uncertainty of insults, as well as the shifts between different insults occurring in one interactional space.

Risum teneatis, amici?☆: The socio-pragmatics of RoastMe humour

ABSTRACTMany of the ways in which music can be used to create meaning for its consumers have been the subject of existing social semiotic literature. However, less is known about how social and cultural environments impact the development of musical sounds. This study uses Tagg’s sign typology as a framework for identifying meaningful signs such as form, responsoriality, and melodic complexity in three jazz bebop recordings by Charlie Parker. It is argued that the values of individuality, communication, and competition expressed by bebop music may be reflections of a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as ritual insults, thus demonstrating one way in which culture affects the creation of musical styles.

This study examines how preadolescent African American students in Washington, D.C., used a linguistic practice called ‘joning,’ a style of verbal play similar to ritual insults, in peer interactions. Sociolinguists have focused on how children socialize each other into vernacular styles appropriate for peer group use but often assume that they disalign with social and linguistic norms for classroom behavior. Drawing from a nine‐month ethnographic study that the author conducted in an after‐school program, this article analyzes the structure and function of joning as a vernacular style of African American Vernacular English and its uses in constructing classroom identities. Joning often facilitated student learning, but it was perceived as a socially and physically risky linguistic practice because of its uses as conflict talk in the local community. Focusing on preadolescence as a key stage of language socialization, this article shows how minority students modify peer‐learned linguistic practices to pursue academic success on their own terms.

In-group members can display a sense of solidarity by earning license to direct verbal putdowns toward one another in the presence of others. An explanation of the process by which in-group members can maintain a sense of solidarity through putdowns in everyday life, however, is lacking in the literature. Set in a corner donut shop in southern California, this article describes how a group of old straight white middle-class men direct improvisational putdowns toward each other and explains how this banter maintains a sense of group solidarity for these men. The article puts forth a view of ritual insult in the form of “humor orgies” as emergent interactional phenomena characterized by successive, situation-dependent turns whereby group members play with interpersonal meanings in “givin’ it” “on top” and “takin’ it” “on bottom.” The findings raise questions about the extent to which superiority theories of humor are adequate and also suggest a need for ethnographies of everyday improvisational humor in public, non-workplace settings.

My conclusion is that the grammar behind VN compounds is the best candidate for a living fossil of proto-syntax. Little about these compounds makes sense except in the light of evolution. Their rudimentary flat combinatorial strategy, defying the most fundamental principles of modern morpho-syntax (e.g. headedness) is accompanied by the semantics and use that point to ritual insult and sexual selection, specializing for derogatory reference. Adding to the exotic nature of VN compounds, their verb surfaces in a(n) (proto-) imperative form. If VN compounds started to be coined in the ancient oneword stage of human language, a stage characterized by the use of imperative verb forms, it is to be expected that they would have been tinkered from what was already available, the imperative forms. These crude compounds, typically exhibiting the most basic of vocabulary, can nonetheless express abstract (human) traits not only with astounding succinctness, but also with humor and playfulness. Using this kind of compounding strategy at the dawn of language would have not only augmented the expressive power of human language enormously, but it would have also provided a foundation for future vocabulary and structure building.

Many gay men in the popular sectors of Lima, Peru participate in vóley callejero, or street volleyball. The ethnographic data presented in this article describes verbal and corporal mechanisms through which gay identity emerges within the particular context of the street volleyball game, ultimately highlighting the contextual nature of identity. The volleyball players are not just hitting a ball back and forth, they are engaging in a meaningful activity that illuminates intersections of language, sexuality, and identity. Through the manipulation of the street into a volleyball court, the volleyball players create a space conducive to the articulation of particular verbal and embodied practices that index gay identity. The challenge to the regulations of “proper” volleyball through the practice of ritual insulting and the cultivation of gay volleyball technique are playful reconfigurations of gendered practices prominent in the sites where fieldwork was carried out.

ABSTRACT:This article presents the tale of a serial flirt, punished for making a noisy, lewd nuisance of himself outside a widows' residence in Florence in 1553. Close study of this vivid episode uncovers some of the sonic strategies of ritual insult and abuse available to early modern city-dwellers, and is also an opportunity to explore the connections between aurality and spatiality in late Renaissance Florence.

Throughout recorded history, sexually mature males have issued humorous insults in public. These ‘verbal duels’ are thought to discharge aggressive dispositions, and to provide a way to compete for status and mating opportunities without risking physical altercations. But, is there evidence that such verbal duels, and sexual selection in general, played any role in the evolution of specific principles of language, syntax in particular? In this paper, concrete linguistic data and analysis will be presented which indeed point to that conclusion. The prospect will be examined that an intermediate form of ‘proto-syntax’, involving ‘proto-Merge’, evolved in a context of ritual insult. This form, referred to as exocentric compound, can be seen as a ‘living fossil’ of this stage of proto-syntax — providing evidence not only of ancient structure (syntax/semantics), but also arguably of sexual selection.

Sociolinguistic studies of ‘minority languages’ and bilingualism have increasingly moved away from a singular emphasis on issues of ethnicity that poses direct links between the use of a language and an ethnic or cultural identity towards exploring the construction of identities that are not firmly located in category-bound descriptions. In this paper, we draw on these latest insights to account for processes of identity construction in a bilingual (in Greek Cypriot and English) youth organization group based in North London. Our main data consist of the audio-recorded interactional data from a socialization outing after one of the group’s meeting but we also bring in insights from the group’s ethnographic study and a larger study of the North London Cypriot community that involved interviews and questionnaires. In the close analysis of our main data, we note a conventional association between the ‘London Greek Cypriot’ (henceforth LGC) variety that is switched to from English as the main interactional frame and a set of genres (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to social practices) that are produced and taken up as humorous discourse: These include narrative jokes, ritual insults, hypothetical scenarios, and metalinguistic instances of mock Cypriot. We will suggest that the use of LGC demonstrates a relationship of ambivalence, a “partly ours partly theirs” status, with the participants carving out a different, third space for themselves that transcends macro-social categories (e.g. the Cypriots, the Greek-Cypriot community). At the same time, we will show how the discursive process of choosing language from a bi- or multi- lingual repertoire does not only create identities in the sense of socially and culturally derived positions but also identities (sic (dis)-identifications) in the sense of desiring and fantasizing personas.

Drawing from close to four years of ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and video recordings, this paper analyzes how inner-city men sustain playful street corner rap "battles" in South Central Los Angeles. Although participants know that the battle is supposed to be a playful way of resolving perceived disrespect in group rap "ciphers," some become "more than play." Indeed, ritual insults have the power to provoke feelings of rage, which can propel individuals into violence. To sustain the playful meanings of battles, participants who offend their opponent use different nonverbal cues to signal, "I was just playing," while the offended party responds with cues signaling, "I do not have any hard feelings." When these moves do not work, onlookers step in between participants, tell jokes, and use other gestures to defuse escalating tensions. The techniques outlined in this article elaborate Erving Goffman's (1974) theories of "keys" and "limits," showing how embodied and emotional cues are used to sustain the shared presumption that "this is play."

In this article, I will argue for abandoning definitions and will suggest the following. First, it is crucial to consider the enormous variety of forms of verbal duels across the world, many of which may not deploy insults or at least may not do so most of the time, and are not performed by young people or by males. Second, it is important for future inquiry to carefully distinguish insults from what I will call outrageous speech such as dirty words and profanity. Third, we need to rethink the link between insults and aggressiveness. Insults are not necessarily threatening, and cannot always be interpreted as aggressive or violent behavior, or even as causing offense to the other party. Finally, it is important to avoid conflating verbal duels with ritual insults, since these are substantially different, albeit overlapping, genres. I will try to tackle each of these issues in order. In conclusion, I will ask the question of why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, a reductionist and overgeneralizing perception of verbal duels as the catharsis of aggression among young men persists. The answer, I will suggest, may be connected to a tendency to dismiss and gloss over argumentative genres of language.

Though play is a universal phenomenon found in all known societies there is a huge number of different ways to play. Several examples of play or games are considered here to explain how people manage their relationships with words, objects and beings. In the first instance, with ritual or ludic insults and riddles, meaning is constructed through an agonistic social process. In the second, objects are used to symbolize and materialize rules, as during eating contests where the competitors are not permitted to drink more than a glass of water. Finally, confrontation with real or virtual opponents (in online games) is a good way to identify theories of mind, because players attribute agency to virtual beings.

Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating one’s verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to “diss” his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participant’s performance generally consists of “freestyle” or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponent’s appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called “Eyedea.” I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, “R.K.” and “Shells”, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like “nigga” (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedea’s Whiteness largely in discursive ways – by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.

Gendered sense of humor as expressed through aesthetic typifications