Renee--
Yes, as I understand it the Javanese system is like a really, really
complicated version of tu/Ud. alternations in Spanish. They have lots
of pronoun alternants like this -- more than 2 for some categories, I
think. And they have alternative words for the same objects, with the
variants indexing the "level" or refinement of the speech being used
(including the position the speaker is taking relative to the addressee,
but not limited to this). And they have alternative words for the same
objects, indexing the deference the speaker is making toward the object
being referred to with the word (so you would use a different word for
'child' when referring to the prince than when referring to your own
child). All this makes Javanese a very difficult language for
foreigners to learn, not so much because you can't learn to denote what
you want but because you can't learn how to position yourself
interactionally in appropriate ways while you denote it.
I agree with you that particular linguistic forms, despite grammatical
categories that presuppose something about deference (eg), can in
practice be used to inhabit many different sorts of identities and enact
various kinds of relationships. As you say, we can "inflect" our
utterances to adopt ironic and other sorts of unexpected positions --
and sometimes others or aspects of the context do this to us against our
will.
Stanton
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307 http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
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