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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1019

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

The role of backgrounded information in the construction of place and identity

Authors: Hovmark, Henrik
Submitted by: Hovmark, Henrik (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

In this presentation I explore the way in which place is constructed in discourse by Danish dialect-speaking informants. I focus on the construction of place as part of the backgrounded setting, the “background orientation” in narratives (Chafe 1980, Johnstone 1990), and I discuss the role of backgrounded information in the construction of place and identity. I argue that the informants’ use of seemingly inconspicuous, backgrounded markers of spatial language (in this case directional adverbs) play a significant role in the informants’ continuous construction of identity, conceptualizing their local home-base as either ‘center’ or ‘periphery’ (Hovmark 2012). Data stem from interviews with dialect-speaking informants in a small Danish, rural community; both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied.

The “spatio-temporal complex” (Prince 1982) is an important part of the setting of a story and typically includes information about specific geographical places, buildings and surroundings (the school, Berlin, Room 2.5.11). However, information about space and place can also be conceptualized and encoded in other linguistic elements, for instance adverbs. In Danish the basic image schema centre-periphery (Croft & Cruse 2004) can be encoded in the use of directional adverbs like ud ‘out’ and ind ‘in’: out to the school, in to Berlin (seen from the speaker’s/agent’s central point of view). Through linguistic and social routine, the choice of adverb is quickly generalized and gives an impression of the mental map of the informants and their speech community. One of the interesting findings when looking at the informants’ consistent, shared uses of the directional adverbs in question, was that the centre-periphery schema entered into discourses that conceptualized and characterized the local community both as centre and periphery, i.e. they entered into apparently contradictive constructions of local identity. However, analyses of the communicative contexts suggested that this intra-group variation could be systematically linked to two specific discourses, each related to different levels of entrenchment: 1) a traditional, dialectal discourse anchored in very basic daily practices (the island seen as centre), and 2) a more recent discourse anchored in a modern socio-cultural setting, mass media, and politics (the island seen as periphery) (Hovmark 2010).

The study points to the existence of orientation markers in narratives which are conveying very general background information: the conceptualization of the local place as either central or peripheral (cf. “contextualization cues”, Gumperz 1992, Levinson 2003). However, seen in careful connection with the foregrounded content of the specific discourses, the general and backgrounded information about the local place takes on a more specific, socio-culturally informed meaning. I give examples of the use of the adverbs in both everyday stories and more dramatic narratives, and I argue that orientation markers of this general kind deserve attention and might carry important socio-linguistic information, exactly because they belong to relatively unconscious levels of conceptualization and are enacted continuously and persistently in linguistic and social routines.