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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 508

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Spoken Signs and Literal Hailing: The case of Tannoyance

Authors: Mooney, Annabelle
Submitted by: Mooney, Annabelle (University of Roehampton, United Kingdom)

Tannoyance is a neologism humorously proposed in 2008 which describes the affective reaction to audio announcements in public spaces, especially prevalent in and around public transport. While the term does not seem to have been taken up, the phenomenon is growing. Tannoyance contributes to the distinctive soundscape of the city, but it also constructs space in particular ways. This paper examines the various kinds of tannoyance, from the pre-recorded to the live scripted. Specifically, attention is paid to syntax, politeness features and the various speech acts tannoyance performs. Announcements range from the usefully informative, through to redundant repetition and indirect threats. While the potential face threatening aspects of announcements are managed, not all have the same level of politeness. A number of speech acts are performed, but as many announcements are pieced together from pre-recorded fragments, questions can be asked about the felicity conditions of the various apologies and warnings. The soundscape created by these messages is also multilayered, as they are delivered on trains, platforms, station concourse and translated into electronic writing separately and together. 

Close attention to the syntactic structure and pragmatic features of these announcements helps understand the aural, socio-political and spatial positioning of the public. This hailing will be discussed in terms of institutional power, historical intertextuality and civil inattention. Further, whether a meaningful distinction can be made between official and non-official utterances will also be discussed. That is, because official and informative messages are spoken by the same voice in the same space, the origin of these spoken signs is not transparent. In this way, the announcements are heteroglossic which is fitting given that public transport (stations and vehicles) can be analysed as heterotopias.

The announcements thus contribute not only to a linguistic landscape but also to the construction of a heterotopia. These contours of this are recoverable from the behaviour of people in the spaces that tannoyance occupies. That is, people stand, move, look and speak in ways that are directly influenced by the tannoyance. People are literally and metaphorically positioned by tannoyance. Moreover, as resistant strategies are limited, the audible linguistic landscape arguably has not only an affective element but also an ideological one. Tannoyance is an excellent example of the way language structures space and human behaviour in a dynamic and durable way. And while Althusser’s concept of interpellation is figurative, in tannoyance we find a literal and audible hailing. That this appears to be unremarkable, in the sense that it is routine, is itself remarkable.