Читать книгу Living Language - Laura M. Ahearn - Страница 34

Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian literary critic whose wisdom about the “socially charged life of language” formed the epigraph of the first chapter of this book. Bakhtin is well known for his concept of heteroglossia, which refers to the multiplicity of socially tinged ways of speaking in any given society – some of high status, some low. We will return to this concept in a later chapter. For our purposes here, Bakhtin suggested another helpful term: double-voiced discourse. Such discourse involves the embedding of others’ voices into one’s own voice, either through direct or indirect quotation, or more subtly through mimicry or tone. Because he was a literary critic and not a social scientist, Bakhtin analyzed this phenomenon in the context of the novel, but it is easy to see its relevance and utility for everyday linguistic interactions. About double-voiced discourse, Bakhtin wrote,

there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions … Double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized. Examples of this would be comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genre – all these discourses are double-voiced and internally dialogized. A potential dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages.

(Bakhtin 1981a:324–325)

Returning to the “#Hashtag” skit for a moment, it is clear that the humor in it depends not only on the use (or overuse) of the word and gesture “hashtag” but also relies heavily on the participants’ allusions to, or direct quoting of, snippets from songs, slogans, and other popular culture sources. These are all examples of Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse and are extremely common in everyday speech. Whenever this sort of discourse takes place, echoes, associations, and even moral connotations stemming from the source of the quotation are taken up by the speaker and then presented, but usually in a refracted way. The “internally dialogized” aspect that Bakhtin mentions allows the speaker to comment upon the words being borrowed – and yet usually say nothing explicitly. In this way, entire genres can be incorporated or commented upon, much as Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake were presenting in “#Hashtag” a commentary on social media users (or at least on those who overuse hashtags).