All Day
February 13 2009
McDonald Room, Menzies Library 9-13 February
Master class and workshop on speech play and verbal art
Tony Woodbury, U of Texas At Austin
This week-long, all-day workshop-format class deals with speech play and verbal art from a linguistic point of view. This typically includes such speech types as puns, jokes, play languages, proverbs, riddles, verbal dueling, narrative, myth, song, poetry, and ritual and theatrical performance; employs such formal features as parallelism, rhyme, alliteration, meter, prosodic distortion, and versification; and such literary tropes as iconicity, imagery, metaphor, metonymy, and quotation. The view is taken that these elements and structures of ‘typical’ speech play and verbal art are characteristic of all speech, including even conversation and expository prose; and that their study in heightened playful and artistic contexts provides a grounding framework for any linguistic or anthropological approach to both form and content in naturally-occurring speech activity.
For linguistics, such a framework raises the crucial issue of the limits of grammatical knowledge and competence, as against a more general competence for poetics and discourse. That is, have our grammatical theories attempted to account for elements more properly belonging to poetics, such as parallelism in gapping and respectively constructions; meter/versification in the postlexical ‘prosodic hierarchy’; or imagistic tropes in reduplicative and echo forms? And can we do better by accounting for these phenomena alongside related poetic phenomena? For anthropology and the study of speech activity as social behavior, this approach offers a framework within which to organize the formal structures discovered in empirical investigations, running a gamut from the unconscious poetic organization found in natural conversation (e.g., turn-taking systems) to the highly conscious poetic organization of a Shakespearian sonnet, or of a disguised speech game.
More broadly, the topic is timely as ever-larger naturalistic corpora of linguistic and musical performance are being assembled, especially with an eye toward documenting and preserving endangered languages and language use. This makes it especially crucial that we develop and extend the tools for analyzing these materials, for understanding and appreciating them, and for conveying what we have learned to other scholars, to speaker and heritage communities, and to a wider public.
Although the disciplinary focus is linguistics, I am not assuming a background in linguistics and I am hoping that class members will come from other disciplines, including anthropology and ethnomusicology. The only prerequisite is a willingness to present interesting recorded material to the class for discussion and analysis.
The class will the week of February 9-13 and will meet all day each day. We will discuss in depth a small number of foundational readings; review some key computational tools for working with recorded audio and video; and the rest of the time will be devoted to hands-on analysis of recorded speech play and verbal art, including both materials brought by the instructor, and materials contributed and presented by class members.
Further Reading
