Speech modeling
Joseph Errington · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1998
In his essay on language and hierarchy in Solo, James Siegel briefly notes the use of “high” and “low” Javanese in what he calls “indirect discourse,” when “ [t]he speaker will repeat something that has been said to him and his own reply” (1986:19). Siegel in passing alludes to this recurring conversational pattern en route to his broader ethnographic concerns: language and translation, the autonomy of self, and the anxieties of power. In his ethnography of Javanese shadow plays, Ward Keeler mentions “direct quotation” as the “recitation of a previous encounter [which] turns into something like a reenactment, each speaker quoted (supposedly) verbatim” (1987:257–58). He interprets such acts as evincing broader Javanese concerns with the assumability of voice and the dissimulation of a mediating presence. With these two labels I take Siegel and Keeler to be alluding in different ways to the broader interactional dynamic I thematize here as “speech modeling.” This chapter similarly sketches shifting interactional engagements which occur when speakers voice or model words which are somehow “not their own,” and in so doing shift their stances to erstwhile addressees who temporarily become bystanding audiences. This practice is linked, in turn, with issues of style usage and style shifting taken up in chapters 9 and 10, because speech modelings and speech style use are jointly presupposing of particular aspects of interactional self/other relations.