DOCUMENTING SPEECH PLAY AND VERBAL ART: A TUTORIAL

In the context of communities undergoing radical language shift, speech play and verbal art are often the focus of feelings of linguistic and cultural uniqueness, value, and untranslatability. We define our topic broadly, as any speech activity where linguistic signs themselves gain special salience in the production and interpretation of discourse, and where language is stretched and put on display, whether in highly-valued genres or in everyday talk. Here we offer a tutorial setting out principles and methods for the recording and analysis of speech play and verbal art in the framework of community-based language documentation, integrating ethnographic and linguistic approaches to heightened language use in all its forms. We first elaborate our approach to speech play and verbal art and the theoretical and general questions it raises. We then turn to documentation: what to record and how to record it in light of how it is understood and valued, and how it may be perceived as linguistically special. From there, we move into the philological and analytical aspects of the work, covering specifics of transcription, annotation, analysis, translation, exegesis, and presentation of language records. We conclude with a prospectus on further directions for documentary work on speech play and verbal art.