Oye Oye lo que Ustedes no Saben: Creativity, Social Power, and Politics in the Oral Practice of Chismeando

Abstract

People in interaction are in a continual state of engagement in socioculturally framed activities. Our participation in these practices involves our knowledge and use of generic‐specific linguistic resources, the instantiations of which move between the expected and the creative. The focus of this article is the locally situated nature of such interplay in the oral practice of chismeando (gossiping) by a group of Dominican women. Specifically I focus on one participant's strategic, creative use of some of the features to transform the nature of her involvement in the intragroup practice. Her actions are discussed in terms of the social powers they engender and the politics of her participation. I suggest that such attention to the everyday experiences of a group helps build an understanding not only of the linguistic and paralinguistic articulations of the practices themselves but, and certainly more importantly, of the sociohistorical lives of the people who construct and participate in them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.