64 Figure 2.2. Vowels in the Odo orthography Sakoda Siegel, 2003, p. 24, IPA added
symbol sound
Odo spelling other examples
IPA
a e
i o
u
ae or ӕ aw
ai au
ei oi
ou r
fun or father fake
feet foam
food fat
fall file
foul fail
foil fold
fur
fanfada fek
fit fom
fud faet
fawl fail
faul feil
foil fould
fr ap up, mada mother, pam palm
red, mek make, tude today bit beatbit, mi me, priti pretty
brok broke, oke okay, ol old but boot, gud good, yu you
raep wrap, laet let, aek act law, awn on, tawk talk
laik like, ai I, krai cry hau how, laud loud, kau cow
eit eight, meid maid, eij age boil, toi toy, chois choice
vout vote, toud toad, gout goat wrd word, hr her, brd bird
ʌ, a e,
ɛ i,
ɪ o
u, ʊ
ɛ, ӕ ɔ
a ɪ, aj
a ʊ, aw
e ɪ, ej
o ɪ, oj
o ʊ, ow
ɹ
Figure 2.3. Consonants in the Odo orthography Sakoda Siegel, 2003, p. 25, IPA added
symbol examples
IPA
b d
f g
h j
k l
m n
p r
s t
v w
y z
ch sh
zh D
‗
bawl ball, rib dawg dog, baed bad
fani funny, inaf enough go, baeg bag
haed had, hou how jank junk, baej badge
kil kill, kik kick ple play, pul pull
mai my, him nais nice, pin
pau ‘finished’, grup group
raet rat, krai cry
sel sell, mas mus’, mus
t tel tell, fait fight
vaen van, neva never wid weed, wea where
yu you, yelo yellow zu zoo, izi easy
chek check, kaech catch shel shell, fish
mezha measure, yuzholi usually
kaDai ‘spicy hot’, kaDate karate ali‘i ‘chief’, Hawai‘i
b d
f g
h d
ʒ k
l m
n p
ɹ s
t v
w j
z
ʧ ʃ
ʒ ɾ
ʔ
2.3.3 Representing my data
Finally, I discuss what is represented and how it is represented in my data. As a non-L1 Hawai‘i Creole speaker, I avoid using eye-dialect and non-standard respellings because I
65 do not share an intuition for the effective use of these kinds of respellings and because I
can bring the reader‘s attention to parts of discourse by other means e.g., arrows, fonts; thus, I adopt the Odo orthography to represent Hawai‗i Creole features and style-shifting
between Hawai‗i Creole and English. I also pursue a Gumperzian approach to discourse and prosody. Hawai‗i Creole is often indicated through phonological and intonational
features, and these need to be marked in transcripts. Discourse analysts have attempted to incorporate some of these features, such as intonational contours, into transcripts e.g.,
Gumperz, 1982, but this remains an underdeveloped area in discourse and conversation analytic research.
23
Hawai‗i Creole scholars hypothesize that Hawai‗i Creole and English form a continuum, rather than that
Hawai‗i Creole and English are two separate codes e.g., Perlman, 1973; Purcell, 1979. This is partly why some scholars prefer using ‗style-
shifting‘ to ‗code-switching.‘ The term style-shifting indicates that Hawai‗i Creole speakers ‗shift‘ from one style to another while the term code-switching indicates that
Hawai‗i Creole speakers make a clear ‗switch‘ from one code to another. Local comedians‘ discursive practice is performative and seems to involve both ‗subtle‘ shifting
and ‗abrupt‘ switching to create humorous effects. I adopt the Odo orthography to mark Hawai‗i Creole features. I make a distinction between Hawai‗i Creole and Hawai‗i
Creole ‗features‘ because I need to focus on intricate shifting in my data. Seemingly
English utterances often include Hawai‗i Creole features. Although it is challenging to determine whether these utterances are English or Hawai‗i Creole, marking Hawai‗i
Creole features in these utterances allows me to examine the intersubjectivity that Local
23
Interactional linguistics may be an exception.
66 comedians and their audiences achieve with respect to the relevance of nuanced
discursive contrasts in a continuum between English and Hawai‗i Creole.
Style- shifting between English and Hawai‗i Creole was studied most extensively
in the 1970s; these studies referred to phonological and prosodic features. For instance, Purcell 1979 stated that the most frequent
Hawai‗i English HE features are ―phonological and prosodic‖ p. 187. Such phonological and prosodic features
demonstrate style-shifting between General English GE and Hawai‗i English: that is,
―from GE to low-gear HE, to high-gear HE, to low-gear HE, and back to GE‖ p. 187. Similarly, Perlman 1973 showed that there are distinctive grammatical, phonological,
and prosodic features that set apart Hawai‗i English HE from English or ―Mainland speech‖ in his term. Perlman redefined Hawai‗i Creole as ―a set of features that is
available to HE speakers as style markers of great or little subtlety‖ p. 241. He also
mentioned a ―stage-dialect‖ that is a highly performative social dialect or style that is associated with comedic characters and TV personalities. In order to describe style-
shifting, Purcell 1979 combined four representational systems: the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA, a special notation system, standard English orthography, and
dialectal respellings e.g., ―firs‖ for first; she also used a hybrid form e.g., ―gradǝ‖ for grade.
I adopt the Odo orthography to mark Hawai‗i Creole features in my data because
it is a legitimate representational system for Hawai‗i Creole.
24
Although I highlight Hawai‗i Creole features in sentencesclauses, I rarely transcribe a whole sentenceclause
24
For more information about Hawai i Creole features, see Purcell 1979, Sakoda and Siegel 2003, Simon 1984, and Vanderslice and Pierson 1967, among others.
67 in the Odo orthography unless it is undoubtedly Hawai‗i Creole.
25
Making such judgments for each utterance is not within the scope of the dissertation, but the
highlighted Hawai‗i Creole features do allow the reader to make a judgment. Another reason I avoid representing a whole sentence in the Odo orthography
is that Hawai‗i Creole and English constitute a continuum; for instance, a single phonological feature
may or may not be enough to represent an utterance as Hawai‗i Creole. Similarly, a single syntactic feature may or may not be enough to represent an utt
erance as Hawai‗i Creole.
The Odo orthography also allows me to be consistent in representing Hawai‗i
Creole features. In contrast to the previous studies discussed above, I do not use either eye-
dialect respellings e.g., ―nite‖ for ―night‖ or non-standard respellings e.g., ―braddah‖ for ―brother,‖ ―t‘ink‖ for ―think‖ because they cause more problems and have
variation among Hawai‘i Creole speakerswriters. While these eye-dialect and non- standard respellings are conventionalized to some extent, they have inherent
representational risks and are always subject to becoming inconsistent. When I discuss mock languages i.e., stylized languages other than English and accented English in
Chapter 5, I use IPA to avoid representing them as part of Hawai‗i Creole and to avoid any excessive stigmatization.
I present an excerpt from Andy Bumatai‘s comedy CD to illustrate what is represented and how it is represented. Bumatai is telling a joke in a stand-up comedy
show for his predominantly Local audience. He uses English as a medium of narration,
25
Some linguistic features belong to more than one language; Woolard 1999 refers to this property as bivalency.
68 and he style-
shifts into Hawai‘i Creole. He indicates the beginning of style-shifting when he uses an address term for his audience i.e., ―
bra
‖ in line 8. His reference to a place name, N n kuli, also projects style-
shifting into Hawai‘i Creole. Bumatai‘s utterances also show Hawai‗i Creole features such as despirantization e.g., ―
daet
,‖ ―
braDaz
,‖ and ―
da
‖ and postvocalic r-deletion e.g., ―
braDaz
‖. I represent another feature, a rising-falling intonation, because it is a crucial
prosodic feature that marks Hawai‗i Creole interrogative utterances e.g., ―↑
wen yu
statid smok
↓
ing ais
ice ‖ in line 17.
26
The intonational contour characterizes this utterance as Hawai‘i Creole. It is only one of the Hawai‘i Creole features, but it strongly marks it
as Hawai‘i Creole. Many of these Hawai‗i Creole features appear in reported speech that is marked by double quotation marks ll. 3, 14, 16-17, which is the topic of Chapter 4.
In addition to dis cursive contrasts between Hawai‗i Creole and English, this
transcript highlights the spontaneity of performance-in-interaction. For instance, this excerpt shows that the audience responds collectively to Bumatai even before he
completes his utterances ll. 5, 13, 15.
Excerpt 5
01 02
03 04
05 06
07 08
09 AB
Aud AB
Aud AB
one thing always drives me nuts if you ever go these . tourist shows
they start with “ALO:::HA:[:.”
a vowel in the last syllable of aloha is nasalized [laugh
tourists think that‟s how we greet each other. laugh
bra, imagine that you in nana£kuli£ £you know what I mean£
26
One might say that the General American English interrogative sentence e.g., ―When did you start smoking ice?‖ has an intonational pattern similar to Hawai‗i Creole that goes from high to low; however,
the Hawai‗i Creole interrogative sentence has a sharper contour from high to low and also has a little ‗scoop‘ at the end of the sentence.
69
10 11
12 13
14 15
16 17
18 Aud
AB Aud
AB Aud
daet two braDaz you know leaning on da car .h they‟re so big da other two wheels off the grou:nd
[£you know£? [laugh
£and you roll up£ . “ALO::[:HA::::.” nasalization
[laugh £I was like£
“wa what bra,” “↑wen yu statid smok↓ing ais ice.”
laugh
I have depended upon Hawai‗i Creole speakers‘ perspectives in producing the transcripts that I analyze in the dissertation. I produced transcripts by myself first, and I had Gavin
Furukawa —a bidialectal speaker of Hawai‗i Creole and English—review these
transcripts with audio recordings. I also presented some of the transcripts in Pidgin Coup meetings, CA Data sessions, and graduate seminars at the University of Hawai‗i at
M noa where I got feedback on the Hawai‗i Creole in the transcripts.
In summary, transcription is a representation of verbal and non-verbal information. It is also a process of entextualization that inevitably leads to an intertextual gap. It is
necessary to be reflective of this intertextual process when one investigates the multilingual use of non-
standard varieties such as Hawai‗i Creole. This stigmatized language variety has been represented through eye-dialect, the Odo orthography, and
other means that were designed to capture the heterogeneity of speech data in Hawai‗i. In
this chapter, I have illustrated my transcription policy that I adopt in the subsequent data analysis chapters Chapters 3-6.
70
CHAPTER 3. STYLIZING THE AUDIENCE
3.1 Introduction
This chapter is the first of four data analysis chapters. This chapter and the following one examine language use in comedy shows. I focus on three comedians i.e., Frank DeLima,
Augie T, and Bo Irvine, who had live stand- up comedy performances in Hawai‗i in 2008.
The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how these comedians discursively construct their audiences through stylization in talk. The relationship between the comedians and
their audiences is jointly constituted in comedic performances-in-interaction. In order to compare the comedy shows of these comedians, I extract the introductory sequences of
each show approximately 3-10 minutes and analyze how the comedians use various semiotic resources not only to create humorous effects but to generate a relationship
between themselves and their audiences. This chapter, thus, highlights the generation of a sense of community in the institutional setting of live stand-up comedy shows.
The data in this chapter show that a sense of community is generated through style. Style is ―a social semiosis of distinctiveness‖ Irvine, 2001, p. 23. Bell 2001
states that one of the most important questions in sociolinguistic studies of style is the ―why this now‖ question; that is, why does this person say it this way here and now? In
other words, this stylistic question is about the notions of context, communicative competence, and appropriateness. Bell 2001 also states that one of the biggest factors
that determines style is audience. Audience design is a theory of identity construction through style; that is, stylization. As discussed in Chapter 1, style mediates between
linguistic variability and categorization; thus, stylization is individual or collective