Passing in conversation

The ArgLab Open Seminar heartily invites everyone to a talk by Grzegorz Gaszczyk (University of Warsaw) on “Passing in conversation” [joint work with J.P. Grodniewicz (Jagiellonian University)].

Abstract

The paper develops a systematic classification of passing strategies in conversation: ways in which speakers use linguistic means to produce, maintain, or exploit the impression that they belong to a given — typically privileged — social category. Passing may concern sexual orientation, gender identity, class, religion, ethnicity, disability, and other socially salient dimensions of identity. Our aim is to show that passing in conversation is not merely a matter of what the speakers say, but also how they say it. This reveals that conversational passing is a broad and complex phenomenon in which speakers strategically manage what others are entitled to infer about who they are. To account for this, we distinguish three broad families of conversational strategies, which we illustrate with real-life cases. First, speech-act strategies are based on the use of complete utterances, including lying, implicating, exploiting ambiguity, shifting topics, or refusing to answer. Second, lexical strategies involve the choice of particular vocabulary, including slang, slurs, code words, labels, or name-dropping, to signal affiliation with a particular social group. Finally, manner-of-speaking strategies exploit how something is said, and concern language choice, accent, pronunciation, pitch, prosody, dialect, and other stylistic features of delivery.

Everybody is welcome!

This seminar series is organised by Pedro Abreu. It gives researchers a platform to discuss work in progress and current problems in philosophy. For administrative inquiries, please contact pedroabreu@fcsh.unl.pt.