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Identifying stylizations in ethnically salient talk among disc jockeys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2013

Heather B. Carroll*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5134 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park Street Madison, WI 53706, USAhcarroll@wisc.edu

Abstract

Before accepting claims of the function of linguistic stylization, it is imperative that we are certain of what we are examining. Mikhail Bakhtin's widely cited definition that stylization is an “artistic representation of another's linguistic style” (1986:362) leaves unclear what counts as “artistic,” making identifying stylizations simultaneously intuitively obvious and empirically illusive. Drawing from 270 hours of data from a radio program, the current study uses interactional discourse and acoustic analyses to compare one disc jockey's exaggerations of ethnically salient accents (stylizations) with his mundane use of reported speech. The analyses demonstrate that in both types of talk he uses a similar bundle of interactional and acoustic resources to design his talk as belonging to someone else. The link between reported and stylized speech places stylizations in an analytical category distinct from that of crossing and its issues of language ownership. The pertinent questions are those of speaker responsibility. (Crossing, stylization, reported speech, discourse analysis, acoustic analysis)*

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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