Curse and contextualization in Romani caretaker speech
Curses have many pragmatic and social functions in Romani discourse. Although in Gabor Roma communities they are often used as strategies of insult, their occurence is not limited to verbal conflicts. Curses are affective conversational routines indicating the speaker’s stance. In order to present their various functions, the paper focuses on caretaker speech. Curses addressed to children are often used to discipline them, but they can be applied as forms of endearment indexing positive emotions as well. In Romani interaction curses can also be framed as playful teasing. Curses in teasing are used as strategies for testing the children's verbal skills, so they play an important role in linguistic socialization. Curses in teasing can also serve as playful modeling of conflict talk, primarily associated with women. The recipients are supported by various metapragmatic signals, i.e., contextualization cues which help them to recognize whether the interaction is intended as a real or ritual insult, or a teasing. The paper gives a detailed interactional sociolinguistic analysis of teasing, and identifies paralinguistic and non-verbal means, as well as other elements on the level of speech act (e.g., withdrawal) and interaction (e.g., repetitions) as contextualization cues. After demonstrating how curses can be contextualized as teasing, the paper points out that curse formulae can also perform metapragmatic work in interaction: certain characteristics of them function as contextualization cues. Socially defined semantic features of curse formulae (e.g., the gender of the referent, diminutive forms) can also be interpreted as socio-culturally specific cues which carry important pragmatic information for the participants sharing the contextualization conventions. The analysis reveals the subtle processes of contextualization and highlights their significance in meaning making in Romani caretaker speech.
Keywords: contextualization, caretaker speech, teasing, gender, curses, Romani languag
