Hostname: page-component-5f745c7db-hj587 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-06T06:43:24.709Z Has data issue: true hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rhymed Talk and Ideophones: Recovering Extinct Discourse Practices from Russian Realist Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Boris Maslov  and
Tatiana Nikitina
Boris Maslov*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, Norway
Tatiana Nikitina*
Affiliation:
CNRS-LACITO, France
*
Contact Boris Maslov at Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Blindernveien 31 Georg Morgenstiernes hus 0313 Oslo, Norway (borismas@ifikk.uio.no); Tatiana Nikitina at LLACAN–UMR 8135 du CNRS, 7, rue Guy Môquet - BP 8, 94801, Villejuif, France (tatiana.nikitina@cnrs.fr).
Contact Boris Maslov at Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Blindernveien 31 Georg Morgenstiernes hus 0313 Oslo, Norway (borismas@ifikk.uio.no); Tatiana Nikitina at LLACAN–UMR 8135 du CNRS, 7, rue Guy Môquet - BP 8, 94801, Villejuif, France (tatiana.nikitina@cnrs.fr).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents a case for approaching works of nineteenth-century realist fiction as proto-ethnographic documents that contain unique evidence for reconstructing extinct discourse practices. We focus on two previously undescribed phenomena: improvised rhyming in sparring dialogue, and the use of ideophones in oral storytelling.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Spring 2022 , pp. 169 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 758232). We wish to thank for consultation and advice the audiences at ASEEES and at the Institute for the Russian Language in Moscow, the two Signs and Society referees, as well as Tatiana Agapkina, Elena Berezovich, Viktoria Ivleva, Georgij Levinton, Bethany Lycan, Pavel Petrukhin, Anna Pichkhadze, and Gabriella Safran. English translations of all passages are ours unless otherwise noted.

References

Abrahams, Roger. 1970. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Rev. ed. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Agapkina, Tat’jana A. 2000. Ètnografičeskie svjazi kalendarnyx pesen: Vstreča vesny v obrjadax i fol’klore vostočnyx slavjan. Moscow: Indrik.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38–59.10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Applegate, Richard. 1975. “Chumash Narrative Folklore as Sociolinguistic Data.” Journal of California Anthropology 2 (2): 188–97.Google Scholar
Arnovick, Leslie K. 1999. Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Axmadulina, Bella. 2005. Mnogo sobak i Sobaka: Rasskazy, vospominanija, èsse. Moscow: Eksmo.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Problemy poètiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1963).10.5749/j.ctt22727z1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barron, A., and K. P. Schneider. 2009. “Variational Pragmatics: Studying the Impact of Social Factors on Language Use in Interaction.” Intercultural Pragmatics 6 (4): 425–42.10.1515/IPRG.2009.023CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartelt, Guillermo. 2010. “On the Ethnohistory of Powhatan Ritual Gestures.” Anthropos 105 (1): 47–56.10.5771/0257-9774-2010-1-47CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1989. “The Reality Effect” (1968). Translated by Richard Howard. In The Rustle of Language, 141–48. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bax, Marcel. 1981. “Rules for Ritual Challenges: a Speech Convention among Medieval Knights.” Journal of Pragmatics 5 (5): 423–44.10.1016/0378-2166(81)90027-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 2004. “Historical Patterns for the Grammatical Marking of Stance: A Cross-Register Comparison.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5 (1): 107–36.10.1075/jhp.5.1.06bibCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blažes, V. V. 2000. “Komičeskij dublet russkogo narodnogo razgovornogo ètiketa.” In Kul’turno-rečevaja situacija v sovremennoj Rossii, ed. N. A. Kupina, 186–96. Yekaterinburg: Izd-vo Ural. un-ta.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1944. “Secondary and Tertiary Responses to Language.” Language 20 (2): 45–55.10.2307/409893CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clay, Catherine B. 1995. “Russian Ethnographies in the Service of Empire, 1856–1862.” Slavic Review 54 (1): 45–61.10.2307/2501119CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Daniel. 2001. Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.85CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drechsel, Emanuel J. 1983. “Towards an Ethnohistory of Speaking: The Case of Mobilian Jargon, an American Indian Pidgin of the Lower Mississippi Valley.” Ethnohistory 30 (3): 165–76.10.2307/481024CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drechsel, Emanuel J.. 2007. “Sociolinguistic-Ethnohistorical Observations on Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in Herman Melville’s Two Major Semi-Autobiographical Novels of the Pacific.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 22 (2): 231–61.10.1075/jpcl.22.2.03dreCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dundes, Alan, Jerry W. Leach, and Bora Özkök. 1972. “The Strategy of Turkish Boys’ Verbal Dueling Rhymes.” In The Ethnography of Communication, edited by John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 130–60. New York: Directions in Sociolinguistics.Google Scholar
Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2010. “Literary Discourse.” In Historical Pragmatics, edited by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, 679–704. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110214284.7.679CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedrich, Paul. 1979. “Structural Implications of Russian Pronominal Usage.” In Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays by Paul Friedrich, 63–125. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Friedrich, Paul. 2003. “Tolstoy and the Chechens: Problems in Literary Anthropology.” Russian History 30 (1/2): 113–43.10.1163/187633103X00116CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. 2000. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226772561.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gasparov, Mikhail. 1996. A History of European Versification. Translated by G. S. Smith and Marina Tarlinskaja. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Originally published as Očerk istorii evropejskogo stixa (Moscow, 1989).10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158790.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginzburg, Lydia. 2001. On Psychological Prose. Translated by Judson Rosengrant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Originally published as O psixologičeskoj proze (Leningrad, 1971).Google Scholar
Gogol, Nikolai. 1995. Plays and Petersburg Tales. Translated by Christopher English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hanks, William F. 1987. “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice.” American Ethnologist 14 (4): 668–92.10.1525/ae.1987.14.4.02a00050CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henne-Ochoa, Richard. 2018. “Sustaining and Revitalizing Traditional Indigenous Ways of Speaking: An Ethnography-Of-Speaking Approach.” Language & Communication 62:66–82.10.1016/j.langcom.2018.07.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hübler, Axel. 2007. The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.154CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Isačenko, A. V. 1975. Die russische Sprache der Gegenwart. Munich: Max Hueber.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Andreas, and Andreas H. Jucker. 1995. “The Historical Perspective in Pragmatics.” In Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, edited by Andreas H. Jucker, 3–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.35.04jacCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1966. “Slavic Epic Verse: Studies in Comparative Metrics” (1952). In Selected Writings, 4:455–59. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1979. “Metrics” (1934). In Selected Writings, 5:147–59. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1987. “On Realism in Art” (1921). In Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 19–27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. 2013. Antimonies of Realism. London: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. 2008. “Historical Pragmatics.” Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (5): 894–906.10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00087.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen. 2010. Historical Pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110214284CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karcevski, Serge. 1927. Système du verbe russe: Essai de linguistique synchronique. Prague: Legiographie.Google Scholar
Karcevski, Serge. 1941. “Introduction à l’étude de l’interjection.” Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 1:57–75.Google Scholar
Kliger, Ilya, and Boris Maslov, eds. 2015. Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press.10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kochman, Thomas. 1983. “The Boundary between Play and Nonplay in Black Verbal Dueling.” Language in Society 12 (3): 329–37.10.1017/S0047404500009970CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroskrity, Paul V. 1993. Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Kurke, Leslie. 2013. “Greek Ways of Speaking (Aggressively): The Case of ὑπολαβὼν ἔφη.” Classics@ 11. https://classics-at.chs.harvard.edu/classics11-leslie-kurke-greek-ways-of-speaking-aggressively-the-case-of-υπολαβων-εφη/.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. “Rules for Ritual Insults.” In Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America, 261–314. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Lermontov, Mikhail. 2013. A Hero of Our Time. Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/owc/9780199652686.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linfoot-Ham, Kerry. 2005. “The Linguistics of Euphemism: A Diachronic Study of Euphemism Formation.” Journal of Language and Linguistics 4 (2): 227–63.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A., and Andreas H. Jucker. 2017. Pragmatics of Fiction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110431094CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucey, Michael. 2015. “Proust and Language-in-Use.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48 (2): 261–79.10.1215/00295132-2882681CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucey, Michael, and Tom McEnaney. 2017. “Introduction: Language-in-Use and Literary Fieldwork.” Representations 137:1–22.10.1525/rep.2017.137.1.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mal’sagova, A. M. 1989. “Vostočnaja leksika v povesti L. N. Tolstogo ‘Khadži-Murat.’.” In L. N. Tolstoj i Čečeno-Ingušetija, edited by T. F. Mal’čevskaja, 138–51. Grozny: Čečeno-Ingušskoe knižnoe izdatel’stvo.Google Scholar
Martin, Richard P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the “Iliad.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Maslov, Boris. 2015. “Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics: Three Extensions of Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics.” In Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov, 128–62. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1:54–68.Google Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana. 2012. “Russian Verboids: A Case Study in Expressive Vocabulary.” Linguistics 50 (2): 165–89.10.1515/ling-2012-0007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nikitina, Tatiana. 2018. “When Linguists and Speakers Do Not Agree: The Endangered Grammar of Verbal Art in West Africa.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28 (2): 197–220.10.1111/jola.12189CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peškovskij, Aleksandr M. 1927. Russkij sintaksis v naučnom osveščenii. Moscow: Učpedgiz.Google Scholar
Pisemskij, Aleksei F. 1959. Sobranie sočinenij v devjati tomax. Vol. 2. Edited and with a commentary by M. P. Eremin and V. A. Maiakin. Moscow: Pravda.Google Scholar
Potebnja, Aleksandr A. 1941. Iz zapisok po russkoj grammatike. Vol. 4, Glagol. Mestoimenie. Čislitel’noe. Predlog. Moscow: Izd-vo AN SSSR.Google Scholar
Propp, Vladimir. 1993. “Russian Folk Lyric” (1961). In Russian Folk Lyrics, edited by Roberta Reeder, 1–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Pushkin, Alexander S. 2007. Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works. Translated by James E. Falen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pushkin, Alexander S.. 1977–79. Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. 10 vols. Leningrad: Nauka.Google Scholar
Rizza, Chris. 2012. “The Carnival of Verbal Dueling.” Text & Talk 32–33:371–90.10.1515/text-2012-0018CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Šaxmatov, Aleksei A. 1941. Sintaksis russkogo jazyka. Moscow: Učpedgiz.Google Scholar
Schwab, Christiane. 2020. “Voices of Observation and Styles of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Sociographic Journalism.” History and Anthropology 31 (4): 417–39.10.1080/02757206.2019.1617707CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherzer, Joel. 1983. Kuna Ways of Speaking: An Ethnographic Perspective. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Sholokhov, Mikhail. 1996. Quiet Flows the Don. Translated by Robert Daglish and revised and edited by Brian Murphy. London: J. M. Dent.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1993. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, edited by John A. Lucy, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511621031.004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication 23:193–229.10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Spitzer, Leo. 1944. “Answer to Mr. Bloomfield (Language 20.45).” Language 20 (4): 245–51.10.2307/410126CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolstoj, Lev. 1960–63. Sobranie sočinenij v dvadсati tomaх. 20 vols. Moscow: Gos. izd-vo xudožestvennoj literatury.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. 1990. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude. 2nd ed. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. 1991. Tolstoy’s Short Fiction. Edited by Michael Katz. London: Norton.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. 2006. War and Peace. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Turgenev, Ivan. 1920. A Sportsman’s Sketches. Translated by Constance Garnett. Vol. 2. London: William Heinemann.Google Scholar
Turgenev, Ivan. 1967. Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. Translated by Richard Freeborn. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Turgenev, Ivan. 1978–86. Sočinenija. 12 vols. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Turgenev, Ivan. 1994. The Essential Turgenev. Edited by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Turgenev, Ivan. 1996. Fathers and Sons. Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Tynianov, Yuri. 2019. “On Literary Evolution” (1927). In Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film, translated and edited by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, 267–82. Boston: Academic Studies Press.Google Scholar
Vdovin, Alexey. 2015. “Nationalizing Science in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia: Ideological Origins of the Naval Ministry’s ‘Literary Expedition.’” Scando-Slavica 61 (1): 100–118.10.1080/00806765.2015.1042761CrossRefGoogle Scholar