Colloquium with Michael Ewing (University of Melbourne)

Monday, January 29, 2024
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Royce Hall, Rm 243

Javanese speakers frequently mention their interlocutors in conversation through use of names, kinship terms and other vocative expressions. Vocatives are of course not unique to Javanese, but they have been long noted as being an extremely important resource for Javanese speakers (Keeler 1975; Errington 1988; Wolff and Poedjosoedarmo 1982). This talk will explore how Javanese speakers use vocatives in informal face-to-face interaction, and I place these small but crucial items in the wider context of Javanese address and reference practices. This talk will suggest that the overarching role vocatives play is in recognizing and highlighting intersubjective impact, thus making intersubjective contact within interaction explicit in an ongoing fashion, rather than simply assumed. They do this by overtly indexing the social relationship that holds between speaker and addressee through choice of vocative form (for example name or kinship term). At the same time, vocatives are part of the interactional moment in which they are expressed, pragmatically linked to the utterance in which they occur. They do not just name a perduring relationship but also participate in the management of turns, topics, stances and participation frameworks in moment-to-moment interaction.

Michael Ewing is Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. His research interests include interactional linguistics, linguistic anthropology and documentary linguistics, with a focus on the languages of Indonesia. He primarily works on the grammar of conversation in Indonesian and languages of Indonesia, including Javanese. He has also conducted research on youth language, and language endangerment and maintenance in Eastern Indonesia. Michael is also actively involved in teaching Indonesian as an additional language. His work is informed by an interest in identity formation including ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality.

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies