Polyphony in Portuguese stand-up comedy: a socio-discursive approach to identity construction

• Autor(a) principal: Morozova, Milana A.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.21747/21833958/red10a7
• topic: Identidade; Polifonia; Interacionismo Sócio-discursivo; Vozes enunciativas; Stand-up comedy; Identity; Polyphony; Socio-Discursive Interactionism; Enunciative voices; Stand-up comedy

This paper focuses on some of the linguistic devices, which contribute to identity construction. Adopting a socio-discursive interactionist approach, the goal is to discover the extent to which polyphony (Bakhtin, 1981) and, more specifically, the distribution of voices by means of personal pronouns in discourse contribute to comedian’s identity construction in the understudied genre of Portuguese stand-up comedy. In a Franco-Swiss perspective (Bronckart, 2012), the term “enunciative voices” stands for mechanisms that contribute to the establishment of pragmatic (or interactive) coherence of the text. This paper demonstrates how a comedian creates different identities in discourse by shifting between the voices of empirical author, social voices, and voices of characters. In particular, the textual analysis shows how pronoun shifts (e.g. between I and we) are used as a strategy not only to produce a humorous effect; it is also used to dynamically display aspects of the comedian’s identity. Comedians may distance and erase their individual identities by identifying with the social voice. Or, by assuming responsibility, they aim at emphasizing their own individual identity as opposed to the social voice, often mocking social principles and orders. The seldom investigated domain of Portuguese stand-up comedy provides a rich ground for the analysis of the comedian’s self and the way it is portrayed in discourse.