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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

How do young plurilingual Mauritians use discourse markers to organise their sociolinguistic space?

Résumé

In Mauritius, where almost everyone is at least bilingual French/Creole, young people use both languages on a daily basis, also presenting ‘mixed’ styles. The proximity of both languages, Mauritian Creole being a French based Creole, makes it uneasy to distinctly associate discourse markers with languages. In my study, I choose a constructivist approach (Tabouret-Keller & Le Page, 1985; Gumperz, 1982) to see how, in interactions, young people use different discourse markers to organise their sociolinguistics space (Juillard, 2016). The questions I will be answering are: (1) do young people associate DM with particular social groups; (2) if they do so, how does it appear in their conversations; (3) can speech styles be constituted by observing their DM’ usage? The analysis is based on six hours of ordinary conversations, mainly dyadic, self-recorded in 2014 by young plurilingual Mauritian people, aged from 15 to 19. Field observations and interviews (within which confrontations to the recordings) add up to this conversational corpus. The analysis is mixed and gathers ethnography of communication’s technics (J. J. Gumperz, 1982; 1986) as well as an attempt to find patterns of practices associated to communities. The results show a complementary use of DM, two close forms of a DM can be used in the same interaction being alternated for pragmatic purposes only, the forms not being associated with a particular act of identity. But in other circumstances, the same DM can be more explicitly associated with speech-styles and groups (for instance through parodic stylisations). Although the young people in the study frequent the same school and most of them form a community of practices (Eckert, 1989), the results show an intern sociological differentiation between them regarding genre and sociocultural factors. References: Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teachers College Press. Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. J. (1986). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (Revised édition). Wiley–Blackwell. Juillard, C. (2016). L’espace sociolinguistique et les actes de Langage. La linguistique, 52(1), 91‐124. Tabouret-Keller, A., & Le Page, R. B. (1985). Acts of Identity. Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04422021 , version 1 (28-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04422021 , version 1

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Shimeen-Khan Chady. How do young plurilingual Mauritians use discourse markers to organise their sociolinguistic space?. Disfiller Workshop - Discourse-pragmatic markers, fillers and filled pauses: Pragmatic, multi-modal, socio- and psycholinguistic perspectives, Jul 2021, Bristol, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04422021⟩
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