This is an invitation to the seminar Language, Space and time that will take place on September 27-28, 2018 at the University of Tampere. The seminar is co-organized by the multidisciplinary research centre Plural and Langnet Spoken Language Studies group. We are pleased to introduce professor emerita Barbara Johnstone from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, as the keynote of the seminar. Johnstone is among the most distinguished sociolinguists whose contribution to spatial theory in sociolinguistics has been particularly influential. The abstract of her talk Chronotopes of Dialect Style is attached at the end of this invitation.
The seminar is free of charge and open for all.
At this point, we invite PhD students and researchers to send paper proposals to the seminar. The seminar days will include data sessions and/or text workshops.
Please send the topic of your contribution as well as a brief abstract (maximum 250 words/1500 characters) via this eform no later than August 15th.
The final program will be out by the end of August. At this point we call for registrations without a contribution.
Barbara Johnstone will participate in both seminar days. The working language is English, but we encourage multilingual practices.
Should you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Johanna Vaattovaara, johanna.vaattovaara@uta.fi.
Abstract
Barbara Johnstone: Chronotopes of Dialect Style
To the extent that they are heard as regional at all, regional ways of speaking index places. But they rarely index place alone. Using or stylizing a regional way of speaking may call up what literary theorist Mikhael Bakhtin called a “chronotope.” Davidson (2007), quoting Bakhtin, defines a chronotope as “an ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ that is ‘always colored by emotions and values’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 83 and p. 243).” This is to say that a language or dialect can index a conceptual world located in time as well as in space, with associated sets of characters related to each other in particular ways. For example, when Americans hear a posh British accent, we may think not just of England, but of the England of of the BBC television program “Downton Abbey,” the England of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when people who spoke that way lived in manor houses in the countryside and had armies of servants.
In this paper, I describe how Pittsburghese, the regional dialect of southewestern Pennsylvania as it is imagined by local people, has been associated over time with four different chronotopes: the “golden age” (working-class Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s), the “timeless local” (“authentic” Pittsburgh, temporally located in the present but with the values and habits of the past), and the “contemporary other” (the post-industrial working class, located at the margins of the “real” Pittsburgh of today), and the “new Yinzer” (the world of contemporary hipsters, not necessarily native to Pittsburgh, who live in gentrified neighborhoods and consume Pittsburghese as a display of insiderness). I show how these complexes of time, place, characterological figure, and value have shaped how Pittsburghese is represented in a variety of media. More generally, I suggest that the idea of the chronotope may be useful to people interested in the relationships between language, time, and place elsewhere.