Poeticsand performativity

Cultivating Participation and the Varieties of Reflexivity in Stand‐Up Comedy

“…Illustrative of the kinds of indeterminate participant frameworks evoked in stand‐up comedy, direct audience address (without direct eye contact) reappears as MacDonald elaborates on (imaginary) transphobic encounters through gradually more invasive interactional and tactile modes—first through words, then through force—allowing audience members to experientially imagine themselves occupying the participant roles associated with each of them. In a multimodally evoked and cumulatively performative progression that builds on the syntactic construction “I can (talk/shake/take),” conversational interaction —something that he is actually doing at the present moment—is first parallelistically juxtaposed with shaking hands —something that is at present only imaginary but easily imaginable—then with catching a prosthetic penis in one's mouth —something that could potentially happen but that would constitute a major transgression of the interaction order (for emergent parallelism in syntax, see Sakita ; for parallelism and performativity, see Fleming and Lempert , 487–492). Moreover, the audience is not supplied with the standard “release of tension” after this sequence of interaction‐turned‐intrusive, but is rather left on its own devices as the performer is already moving on to his next bit.…”

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

“…This representative then continued by saying that 'my [political] party' not only wanted to emphasize and to rediscover this local language (lines 17-19), but it also wished to give it back the dignity it has always had' (lines 20-21). Furthermore, the fact that these lines are highly parallelistic (Jakobson, 1957;Caton, 1986Caton, , 1987Silverstein, 1998;Wilce, 1998;Perrino, 2002;Glick, 2007Glick, , 2016Fleming and Lempert, 2014) makes this stand out, a move typical of political oratory (Lempert and Silverstein, 2012). Parallelism helps discourse "call attention to itself," making it "memorable, repeatable, decontextualizable" (Wilce, 2001: 191).…”

Phatic Violence? Gambling and the Arts of Distraction in Laos

“…It is an oft‐repeated truism in linguistic anthropology that the poetic function need not be limited to “poetry,” or confined to a single pragmatic effect. To make “phaticity” more useful, we should be equally adamant that positive communion is not embedded “inside” contact (see Fleming and Lempert for recent discussion of poetic performativity), even if it is often interpreted and talked about as such in our fieldsites. Contact qua affordance motivates rather than determines contact tropes and construals of communication in interaction.…”