On Some Uses of Poetics in the Ethnographic Study of Speech: Lessons from Interaction in Language Shift Contexts

Abstract

Research among speakers of a dying variety of Albanian (Arvanítika) as spoken in modern Greece suggests that a focus on narrative and performance can reveal aspects of interaction that do not surface if sociolinguistic investigation is restricted to a traditional correlational method. A combination of concepts and tools from poetics, the ethnography of speaking, and discourse analysis does more justice to the complex aspects of communication under conditions of rapid language shift than does a mere emphasis on linguistic structure and the macro-dimensions of social structure. Language and social structure are evident in discourse; thus, text and its contextualization as they are interrelated in narrative provide a more sophisticated basis for grasping interaction and change.

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