Colloquium with Dwi Noverini Djenar (The University of Sydney)
Thursday, October 24, 2024
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Royce Hall, Rm 243
Broadcast news interviews are a vehicle for relaying news to an audience and a space where relations among political actors are displayed for the benefit of the public. As conversation analytic studies on this form of institutional talk have shown, orientation to the audience is a characteristic that differentiates the news interview from conversation. I will discuss how interview participants orient to this institutional norm by diverting from ‘risky’ talk, i.e., talk that is treated by the participants as speculative or overly personal. Based on a study of Indonesian interviews, it will be shown how they do this through animating and reanimating the voices of unnamed figures. Among the highly transparent elements in the figure composition are reference to the self and the addressee and segmentals and suprasegmentals. Performed across three interview events, the initial animation functions metapragmatically to guide the construal of the reanimations. Though by virtue of shared knowledge and pragmatic inference, the animated voices can be identified with real-life persons, figurating enables the participants to comment on the conduct of politicians without abandoning the institutional norm of the news interview.
Novi Djenar is Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at The University of Sydney. She has worked on the stylistics of adolescent literature, focusing on the production and circulation of styles and their relationship to sociolinguistic change. Her current research focuses on language and relations among social actors in public spheres, particularly in broadcast settings. Novi is co-author of Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (2018; with Michael Ewing and Howard Manns) and co-editor of Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Communities (2023; with Jack Sidnell).
Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian Languages & Cultures