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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 751

Part of Session 115: Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

“While my ukulele gently weeps”: A pragmatics of emotion in crosscultural media talk

Authors: Furukawa, Toshiaki
Submitted by: Furukawa, Toshiaki (Osaka University, Japan)

Emotion is one of the most important semiotic resources that people use in everyday life and in institutional settings, and it has remained one of the most popular topics in discourse analytic research. As some discursive psychological studies have argued (Edwards & Potter, 1992), a discourse analysis of emotion must overcome the cognitivism that sneaks into its analytical process, examining emotions as topics in talk-in-interaction. Another challenge that a discourse analysis of emotion faces is to explore the use of emotions as semiotic resources in multilingual interaction. In order to deal with these challenges and contribute to a pragmatics of emotion, I approach emotions in crosscultural contexts by considering them as actions that are publicly displayed through talk, embodied practice, and manipulation of artifacts. I also take a sequential and membership categorization analytic approach to “media talk” (Hutchby, 2006) in which a musician from Hawai‘i interacts with TV or radio personalities from the mainland United States. The goals of the study are (1) to demonstrate the way that these interactants occasion and manage emotional displays while talking about Hawai‘i and (2) to show what interactional consequences and moral implications the emotional displays have.

Jake Shimabukuro is an ukulele virtuoso who started his career in Hawai‘i and began to build his fame nationwide and globally in 2005 with a YouTube video clip in which he played George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the ukulele. Since then, he has performed in many cities and also appeared on many TV and radio shows, including popular late night talk shows in the United States. I searched the internet and collected two radio interviews and one TV interview. I transcribed these interviews according to CA conventions and then analyzed the interaction between Shimabukuro and the host of each program.

Findings show that it was always the host who initiated the pronunciation of the Hawaiian-origin word “ukulele” as a topic and that the reference to the proper and improper pronunciations (i.e., [ukulele] vs. [jukәleɪlɪ]) of the instrument’s name occasioned emotional displays such as laughter. Moreover, the hosts deployed personal pronouns to constitute two groups, that is, those who are not from Hawai‘i and pronounce the word improperly and those who are from Hawai‘i, pronounce the word properly, and could be offended by the wrong pronunciation. Responding calmly to this kind of characterization by one of the hosts, Shimabukuro denied that people in Hawai‘i might be offended by the wrong pronunciation; still, he made the Hawai‘i and U.S. mainland distinction. Shimabukuro and the hosts described well-known ukulele properties, such as being easy, simple, and not intimidating to play, and they jointly constituted the ukulele as an instrument of joy for everyone, thereby reproducing a popular image of Hawai‘i as a paradise in the Pacific.

References

Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive psychology. London: Sage.

Hutchby, I. (2006). Media talk: Conversation analysis and the study of broadcasting. Glasgow: Open University Press.