Functions of Language - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2011

By drawing on methods used in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics this article discusses the interplay between grammar and social interaction. It investigates a reduplicate linguistic item in Finnish called the ‘joke-joke’ structure. It is shown that the structure is used in interactional sequences in which some prior turn can be understood to be ambiguous in meaning and to have been produced either seriously or non-seriously. Speakers use the ‘joke-joke’ structure, as a kind of metacomment, to shift from an implied serious stance to a non-serious position. In essence, they use the structure to recontextualize and make the prior position ambiguous retroactively. It can thus be considered as a specific form of repair. The structure predominantly occurs in teasing and overstatements. The use of the structure can be seen to reflect the participants’ mutual understanding of sociocultural values. The use of the reduplicate structure can also be seen to be functionally motivated: it can be produced quickly and it iconically intensifies the meaning of ‘joking’. The findings here also support previous findings that reduplicates are frequently used to display emotional states. Finally, this article shows that meanings and understandings frequently emerge and are negotiated in social interaction.

This article analyses the function that code-switching plays in selected testimonies given at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which followed the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. In a number of testimonies, victims of human rights abuse under Apartheid code-switched into Afrikaans when recalling particularly offensive uses of language by the police. Within the code-switching literature, it is well recognised that a speaker’s choice of code, particularly for quoted speech, is a strategy for performing different kinds of local identities which index a range of social meanings and relationships (Álvarez-Cáccamo 1996, Koven 2001). Thus code-switching may serve a complex evaluative function although the meanings it generates are very context-dependent. In order to explore this role in the testimonies in this paper, I use the appraisal theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin & White 2005). I argue that on a number of occasions, code-switching into a particular variety of Afrikaans is used by testifiers as a strategy to invoke negative judgement: it has the effect of associating the police with a particular racist ideology and positioning them for our sanction. Further, it works together with other engagement resources to insert a recognisable historical voice into the text, thereby expanding the heteroglossic nature of the discourse while simultaneously allowing the speakers to signal their rejection of that voice and the ideologies it represents. In the current SFL literature, however, code-switching has not been noted as an appraisal resource. In the light of the examples from the TRC testimonies, I argue that, in multilingual contexts, code-switching has the potential to invoke complex evaluative meanings and should be included in the appraisal framework as an evaluative resource.

This article is a quantitative examination of the function of prosody in distinguishing between the genres of oral performance and expository discourse in Ahtna, an Athabascan language of south-central Alaska. Within the framework of the intonation unit (e.g., Chafe 1987) I examine features of prosody related to both timing (intonation unit length and duration, pause duration and distribution, and syllable pacing) and pitch (pitch reset, boundary tones, and intonational phrasing). I show to a statistically significant degree that most of the prosodic burden of distinguishing genre is carried by a particular intonation contour that is associated with Ahtna oral performance and causes several measurable distinctions between genres.