Barbara Johnstone (Carnegie Mellon University)

Barbara Johnstone er en af sværvægterne i den internationale socio- og diskurslingvistik, og hun gæster Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, KU fra september til og med november. Man kan læse mere om professor Johnstone og hendes forskningsinteresser her:http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/english/people/faculty/bios/barbara-johnstone.html

Titlen på Barbara Johnstones foredrag er How you'uns became Yinzers: From Areal Distribution to Regional Identity. Se abstract nedenfor.                                          

Efter foredraget vil der være middag med Barbara Johnstone. Lingvistkredsens medlemmer er velkomne til at deltage – for egen regning. Tilmelding til Jan Heegård, janhp@hum.ku.dk senest d. 4. oktober.

Abstract:

How you'uns became Yinzers: From Areal Distribution to Regional Identity    

The second-person plural pronoun yinz (spelled “you’uns” elsewhere) has been a semiotic resource in Pittsburgh ever since colonial-era Scotch-Irish immigrants brought it to the area.  Its use then is still one of its uses now: in address to two or more people.  In the course of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, however, yinz has acquired new ways of meaning, such that it is now one of the most visible icons of localness in Pittsburgh.  Yinz appears on bumper stickers and t-shirts that say things like “Yinz are in Steeler [football] Country.” It is used as a graffiti tag.  It has become a productive morpheme in neologisms like yinzer, Yinzburgh, and yinzplay.  Yinz shows up when people want to claim they are Pittsburghers and when Pittsburghers address the world as Pittsburghers.    

In this paper, I trace the semiotic history of yinz, starting from when it was an unremarked feature of vernacular speech, with no social resonance.  I explore how yinz has become enregistered (Agha 2003, 2008) with class and localness, paying particular attention to the role of material artifacts in this process.  I then describe how this set of social meanings has been taken up into a new semiotic order, such that yinz can now index youthful urban hipness.  Few Pittsburghers use yinz in all these ways, however.  I use the idea of “semiotic layering” to characterize the multiple orders of meaning in which yinz now makes different kinds of sense to different urban publics.