Dialect, trope, and enregisterment in a Melanesian speech community

This paper examines the enregisterment of dialect shibboleths among the Yopno of Papua New Guinea. The Yopno recognize dialect shibboleths as indexes of a speaker’s “home village,” yet people employ dialect shibboleths associated with others’ villages in systematic ways, offering little explicit metapragmatic commentary about such uses. Through the analysis of two interactional events, this paper demonstrates how the social meaning of using another’s dialect shibboleths is generated through figures of speech (i.e. tropes) that are manifest in the implicit metapragmatic structuring of discourse through parallelism. Though much work on enregisterment foregrounds the role of explicit metapragmatic discourse in the process, this case highlights the important role played by tropes figured in the implicit metapragmatic structuring of discourse.

► Analysis of the social meaning of linguistic variants in Yopno, a Papuan language. ► Dialect variants are culturally conceptualized as indexing the speaker’s provenance. ► But speakers systematically use variants of other dialects though cannot explain why. ► Analysis of textual parallels reveals the tropic meaning of such usage. ► Variants are enregistered with distinct social effects through such tropic usage.