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Narratives at the Crossroads of Generations and Languages 1

2009; Routledge; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00393270903361123

1651-2308

Angela Falk,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Abstract Narratives in bilingual, intergenerational conversations offer an important site for examining how age identity is verbally constructed when language comprehension itself is also periodically in focus. This study investigates three conversational extracts of an older speaker (one woman, age 86) and her much younger friends (two women, mid-30s), who speak Swedish and American English. Analyses of the Swedish conversations locate where the older speaker accommodates to her listeners by providing glosses and sufficient details to be able to launch and sustain her narratives, while she simultaneously positions herself as older through themes concerning the distant past. The younger interlocutors nonetheless actively seek to accommodate to the discourse structure established by the older speaker with their responses. The article presents a taxonomy of rhetorical patterns that the elder speaker uses to accentuate the age difference between herself and the younger speakers. Notes 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Research Seminar in English Linguistics, Department of English, Uppsala University, 7 November 2006; the Colloquium on Bilingual Research, co-sponsored by the Department of Scandinavian Languages and the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, 26 October 2006; the Research Seminar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Gävle University College, 29 March 2006; and at the annual meeting of The Nordic Association for American Studies, held at Växjö University, 27 May 2005. I am very grateful to the audience members for their comments as well as to Allan Bell and Nikolas Coupland for feedback that helped me focus my argumentation. I would also like to thank Penelope Eckert, whose course "The social meaning of variation", taught at the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University in April 2005, helped me consider narratives in the construction of personae from a life-span perspective. Thanks go to Erik Falk for thoroughly checking the transcriptions and for giving insightful feedback on my translations and text. Data transcription and the early preparation stages for this article were supported in part by a teaching-reduction grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Council at Gävle University College, Sweden. I acknowledge this institutional support with gratitude. All remaining shortcomings in this paper are, of course, my own responsibility. 2 On holding the attention of listeners, see Eriksson (Citation1997) and Ochs and Capps (Citation2001); on constructing aspects of identity, see, for example, Coupland (Citation2004); on making aspects of identity relevant for listeners, see Engblom (Citation2004); on making points about others, see Bauman (Citation1986), Norrby (Citation1998) and Eriksson (Citation1999); and on organizing events into a coherent discourse, see especially Bruner (Citation2004 [1987]); Klein (Citation1989); Linde (Citation1993); Chafe (Citation1998); Norrick (Citation1997, Citation2000); Cook-Gumperz (Citation2005) and Shuman (Citation2005). 3 The term bilingual in the context of my study is used to refer to two languages in use in social interaction, rather than in an evaluative sense to refer to the advanced skills of individual speakers. The younger speakers in this case study did not have native-like competence in Swedish at the time of the recordings, but they had fairly extensive experience communicating in bilingual settings of the Swedish–American community in Minneapolis. Description of this bilingual milieu, as well as another Swedish–American community, Lindsborg, Kansas, may be found in Karstadt (Citation2003). 4 On the linguistic accommodation that is manifest in language contact settings, see, for example, Hasselmo (Citation1974); Dorian (Citation1982); Escure (Citation1982); Rickford (Citation1987); Börestam Uhlmann (Citation1994); Kerswill (Citation2002); Sankoff (Citation2002); Karstadt (Citation2002, Citation2003); and Saville-Troike (Citation2003). For examples of intergenerational L1 convergence and divergence, see especially Coupland et al. (Citation1991: 46 and 64), extracts 2.7; I22, E11; and I21, E12. 5 The arguments on rhetorical projection and conversational agency come from Coupland et al. (Citation1991: 66): "age identity is best seen as, on the one hand, an intrinsically rhetorical projection and, on the other, as an inference to be drawn from the interplay of various age, health and other circumstantial or experiential reports". "We argue that 'elderliness' is in significant ways manufactured and modified in sequences of talk in which older speakers are involved, through the agency of elderly and younger speakers. We shall show that elderly identity can be a highly unstable phenomenon, reflecting the local circumstances in which it is produced" (Coupland et al. Citation1991: 55–56). Important parallels are found in Eckert's work with focus on age: "Social meaning in variation is not a static set of associations between internal linguistic variables and external social variables; it is continually created through joint linguistic and social engagement of speakers as they navigate their ways through life" (Eckert Citation2000: 43). See also Eckert (Citation1997: 167). 6 Though it is too early to draw any conclusions, this finding in itself suggests that age categorization processes in friendship conversations are typically not salient – presumably because no new information is added to such a conversation – but temporal framing processes are. 7 Detailed discussion of psycho-social factors affecting accommodation in discourse is beyond the scope of this article. Comprehensive overviews are available in, for example, Coupland and Nussbaum (Citation1993); Nussbaum and Coupland (Citation1995), and Williams and Nussbaum (Citation2001). Challenges to communication resulting from physical impairments to the senses and to mobility are within the realm of studies examining bilingual, intergenerational conversations, but they will not be examined in this study. An overview of research on how elder speakers' communicative abilities are judged by younger listeners may be found in Williams and Nussbaum (Citation2001: 70–73, 76–83). 8 Cf. Coupland et al. (Citation1991), who actually identified the reverse discourse patterning in conversations between older and younger participants, whereby younger speakers typically "are dominant in the domain of discourse management" (Coupland et al. Citation1991: 156). 9 This is a pseudonym, as is Lynn. My friendship with Greta began in 1990, when our paths crossed at numerous Swedish–American social events. Greta and I had recorded an interview in English in 1991, which was one recording among others in my fieldwork documenting the English spoken by elders in Swedish–American communities (Karstadt Citation2003). 10 The terms story and narrative are used as synonyms in this paper. 11 I am grateful to Erik Falk, Peter Grund and Erik Smitterberg for their advice and suggestions concerning translations of Greta's Swedish. Her Swedish in the data set exhibits evidence of language contact phenomena relating to her syntax and phrasing, among other areas. More could certainly be said about the word order she uses in Swedish as a possible strategy of linguistic accommodation in the conversations with the L2 speakers of Swedish. In this study, however, I have chosen to place most of my emphasis on discourse structure and on her lexical choices. 12 An abstract can consist of one to two clauses that summarize the narrative that will be told (see Labov Citation1972: 363). 13 Labov (Citation1972: 365) defines a coda as "one of the many options open to the narrator for signaling that the narrative is finished". Codas can bring the relevance of the past event into the present. 14 There are, however, some English items that are not self-corrected, including streetcar and such discourse markers as um-hum (line 1; uh-huh and um-hum appear in other places, too); but (line 3) and and (line 20). 15 In addition to her assistance with the word tuggummi, Greta constructs a Swedish loan translation fem-och-tio-öres butik (line 17) for "five-and-dime" store. Some native speakers of Swedish have reacted with mild surprise to Greta's loan translation, as the lexical equivalent does not exist in Swedish. Among them, Ulf Jonas Björk observes that when Greta seems to make special efforts to avoid using English terms, her Swedish exhibits some lexical hypercorrection (personal communication, 27 May 2005). 16 Shuman (Citation2005: 68) also discusses the lament of the lost past. See also Norrby (Citation1998: 321), who has identified some major categories of storytelling function, including storytelling as therapy. 17 Because the younger women did not have first-hand experience in Minneapolis from this time frame, unspecified, but certainly situated before their birth, one could argue that they would not have meaningfully contributed to the details that Greta had just given, nor to the attitude of loss that she has shared. If they had contributed details relating to the demolition of buildings in the downtown region, which they potentially could have known about through a series of recently-produced television documentary programs, they would have risked trivializing Greta's honest confession of loss. See Coupland et al. (Citation1991: 163) for analysis of painful self disclosure. 18 Coupland et al. (Citation1991: 74) observe: "Cross-generation talk does in these ways draw on different agendas, and different rhetorical possibilities or probabilities within shared agendas. Consequently, accommodative options in this context are likely to be severely curtailed, often with no preferable strategy readily available. As we have already suggested, there may be an inadequate experiential base for young interlocutors to draw upon in circumstances where a neutral option might otherwise be to match anecdotes, opinions or ideologies". 19 Shuman (Citation2005: 55) notes "Both the personal and the collective story can be legitimizing categories that provide meaning and pattern to life, but traversing the terrain between the personal and the collective can be fraught with obstacles to understanding". 20 See particularly Coupland et al. (Citation1988), who present a framework of speech accommodation theory with intergenerational communication in mind; and Williams and Nussbaum (Citation2001: 134–137), who focus on, for example, "temporal framing processes", "self association with the past", and "recognizing historical, cultural or social change" (136). 21 Another discourse topicalization approach that Greta uses elsewhere in the data (in an extract not included here; see Falk Citation2009) is to ask whether the women have already heard a story that she wants to tell. 22 Coupland et al.'s viewpoint regarding this has influenced me: "[e]lderly people's reflections on change are made very often in the presence of young interlocutors, who have, by definition, limited potential to share or match the elderly's historical experiences. On the other hand, if younger speakers reflect on change, their elderly interlocutors, of course, have equal potential" (1991: 73).