Talking with Abuelo: Performing Authenticity in a Multicultural, Multisited Family
Abstract
Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, this study explores how multicultural and multilingual siblings interact with their Spanish grandfather and how, through the use of styling and stylization in these interactions, they negotiate and construct multicultural family identities. Using Tannen’s power and solidarity framework, I analyze three excerpts from a seven-hour corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face recorded conversations between my sisters, my grandfather, and myself, from 1984 in Spain to explore how speakers use stylization to identify themselves as legitimate members of a multilingual and multicultural family, ranging from acts of identity to mockery. The analyses show that while stylization provided Abuelo with resources for creating harmony with his granddaughters as he reappropriated their Spanish usage, it also created a source for mockery among the sisters. In their conversations with their grandfather, the granddaughters used stylization to perform acts of identity through reported speech about their experiences in Spain and their feelings about their extended family, and this styled them as dutiful granddaughters. Finally, Abuelo styled himself as the authority figure in the house by speaking English to the girls, albeit an English heavily influenced by his Spanish. In response, the granddaughters stylized him, mocking his authority in the process. The study demonstrates how stylization is intimately tied with acts of identity and underscores the affiliative and disaffiliative interactional stances for creating authenticity in a transnational family.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to both the University of Hawai’i Graduate Student Organization as well as The Ruth Crymes Memorial Grant and the UH Foundation for a granting me scholarships which allowed me to attend conferences and receive invaluable feedback for this paper. I would also like to thank Christina Higgins and the anonymous reviewers whose guidance and insights added value to this paper.
Transcription conventions
- (.)
Micro pause less than 0.2 seconds
- (1.0)
Timed pause
- ∘ ∘
Quiet or soft voice
- (comma)
Slightly rising intonation contour
- ?
Rising intonation contour
Inflection intonation contour
- ↑
Sharp rise in pitch
- ↓
Sharp fall in pitch
- :
Elongated sound
- ⇶
Synchronous speech of three people
- ⇉
Synchronous speech of two people
- ??
Incomprehensible
- Italics
(Intersentential) code-switch
- [[]]
International Phonetic Alphabet
- {}
Author’s description
- < >
Slower than surrounding talk
- << >>
Slower than surrounding talk, within slower talk
- > <
Faster than surrounding talk
- =
Overlap
- word
Loud voice
- WOrd
Especially loud voice
- WOrd
Strongly loud voice, louder than “Word”
- MORE
Accented than other words/syllables
- 1SG
1st person singular
- 2PL
2nd person plural
- 3SG
3rd person singular
- COP
Copula
- DAT
Dative
- F
Feminine
- IMP
Imperfective tense
- INFR
Informal
- M
Masculine
- N
Neuter
- NEG
Negation
- PST
Past
- PROG
Progressive
- PRS
Present
- Q
Question marker
- REFL
Reflexive
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Insults or Acts of Identity? The Role of Stylization in Multilingual Discourse
- “Mista, Are You in a Good Mood?”: Stylization to Negotiate Interaction in an Urban Hawai’i Classroom
- Talking with Abuelo: Performing Authenticity in a Multicultural, Multisited Family
- Stylizing Voices, Stances, and Identities Related to Medium of Education in India
- Stylizing Dialects and Restructuring the Nation of Nepal in Stand-Up Comedy
- “Cool” English: Stylized Native-Speaker English in Japanese Television Shows
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Insults or Acts of Identity? The Role of Stylization in Multilingual Discourse
- “Mista, Are You in a Good Mood?”: Stylization to Negotiate Interaction in an Urban Hawai’i Classroom
- Talking with Abuelo: Performing Authenticity in a Multicultural, Multisited Family
- Stylizing Voices, Stances, and Identities Related to Medium of Education in India
- Stylizing Dialects and Restructuring the Nation of Nepal in Stand-Up Comedy
- “Cool” English: Stylized Native-Speaker English in Japanese Television Shows
