Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance

Bell, Allan; Gibson, Andy

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00517.x

Cited by 217 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

110

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This is in part related to the diverse genres of performance treated in these articles, since the 'higher' the performance is, the greater the staged boundaries are typically established between performers and audiences (Bell & Gibson 2011). At the same time, in the corpora collected here, the boundaries between audience and performers are often porous in ways that do not simply reflect the stage.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this special issue, we 1 build on Bauman's seminal observation about performance, that 'the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surrounding and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience ' (2000:1). More recently, scholars have moved to examining the performative role of heteroglossia, that is, the use of multiply sourced, semiotic (verbal and nonverbal) forms. 2 In particular, this line of research has shown how attention to heteroglossic performances and their local interpretations can illuminate the subtle politics of dominant and nondominant identities in different ethnographic contexts. This is particularly true of what Coupland (2007) calls 'high performances', which, as Bell & Gibson (2011:558) write, are privileged sites for allowing participants to indexically associate expressive forms with social personae. Thus, while all performances are inherently reflexive, heteroglossic performances particularly amplify that reflexivity with respect to their multiple frames, voices, and stances that they presuppose and establish.The articles in this special issue thus investigate the diversity of heteroglossic resources, associated processes of social identification, participation frameworks, and political implications at stake in performance. The articles examine how performers evoke, stage and implicitly evaluate recognizable voices from the larger social world, and how audiences respond to and display their recognition of performers' aesthetically and politically charged stagings of those voices. As a collection, the articles then also explore how people use sets of semiotic resources to gradiently challenge and/or reinscribe normative ideologies and locally recognized, hierarchically organized identity categories.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The phenomenon of overshoot is typical of staged performance (Bell and Gibson 2011) or high performance (Coupland 2007), due to its self-aware, stagey and sometimes hyperbolic nature. Staged/high performance is scheduled, preplanned, and often characterised with heightened intensity, form-focusing and reflexivity (Coupland 2007: 146-154;Bell and Gibson: 2011: 562-563).…”

Section: Acts Of Identity: Emulation Constraints and Overshootmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Selected phonetic features indexed as "American" and "Cockney" are analysed in the singing and speaking styles of a British vocalist, Adele. Overshoot, understood as a greater frequency or an exaggerated quality of a given feature, is characteristic of staged performance (Bell and Gibson 2011;Coupland 2007). PRAAT is used to establish the acoustic properties (F1 and F2) of the BATH and TRAP vowels, as well as the presence or absence of the BATH-TRAP split.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Overshooting Americanisation. Accent Stylisation in Pop Singing – Acoustic Properties of the Bath and Trap Vowels in Focus

Konert-Panek

2017

RiL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper addresses the problem of overshoot involved in singing accent stylisation. Selected phonetic features indexed as “American” and “Cockney” are analysed in the singing and speaking styles of a British vocalist, Adele. Overshoot, understood as a greater frequency or an exaggerated quality of a given feature, is characteristic of staged performance (Bell and Gibson 2011; Coupland 2007). PRAAT is used to establish the acoustic properties (F1 and F2) of the BATH and TRAP vowels, as well as the presence or absence of the BATH-TRAP split. The results show that Americanisation regarding the BATH-TRAP split in singing is present and the Americanised vowel tokens are “overshot”, having higher F2 frequency compared with the regular British TRAP vowel.

show abstract

“…The above argument finds an echo in Bauman (2011) and Bell and Gibson (2011) who maintain that the sociolinguistic emphasis on 'natural, unselfconscious' speech should not render the analyst insensitive to other forms of context-specific and culturally-relevant vocal performances. To quote Bauman and Sherzer (1989: 7), performance consists of the "interplay between resources and individual competence, within the context of particular situations."…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth Discourse in Multilingual Mauritius: The Pragmatic Significance of Swearing in Multiple Language

Auckle

2017

SPILPLUS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing from Dewaele (2010Dewaele ( , 2013, this paper seeks to analyse the socio-pragmatics of swearing in face-to-face multilingual conversational encounters and argues that the conversational locus (Auer 1984) of playfulness favours, among others, the co-occurrence of slang and code-switching (CS). Defined by Eble (1996: 11) as an "ever changing set of colloquial words and phrases that speakers use to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend or fashion in society at large", slang is more often than not associated with the speech of youngsters seeking to set up the linguistic boundaries of their in-group. Viewed as a global phenomenon, which is transposed differently in local contexts by young people hailing from different social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds -including, as Zimmerman (2009: 121) notes, dialectal and sociolectal backgrounds -it acts as a marker of symbolic "desire and consciousness of youth alterity". Such a situation can be endowed with further sociolinguistic complexity in multilingual situations such as Mauritius, where the wide range of available languages endows speakers with an equally fertile repertoire of swear words derived from diverse sources.In keeping with the above, this paper focuses on a series of multi-party recordings carried out between October 2011 and March 2012 and analyses the ways in which the usage of swear words in multilingual contexts can act not only as a reflection of speakers' communicative competence, but also as an externalisation of their dynamism and creativity. The use of swear words in conjunction with CS is, thus, viewed as being a pragmatically consequential conversational act. Such linguistic versatility appears to be indexical of a reflexive position that youngsters orient themselves to by allowing their linguistic output to be seen as a performance, "involv[ing] on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content" (Bauman 1975: 293).

show abstract

Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance

Cited by 217 publications

References 24 publications

Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

Overshooting Americanisation. Accent Stylisation in Pop Singing – Acoustic Properties of the Bath and Trap Vowels in Focus

Youth Discourse in Multilingual Mauritius: The Pragmatic Significance of Swearing in Multiple Language

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About