Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dwi Noverini Djenar, Associate Professor and Chair of the Indonesian Studies Department at The University of Sydney, who will discuss the exonerative accounts in political discourse.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Government.

About the Talk

Studies on accounts within the conversation analytic and interactional linguistic traditions have pointed out the difficulties in approaching exonerative accounts as categories within a taxonomy or as speech acts. These studies suggest, for example, that there is no determinable family of exonerations, that any level of a category can be realized in a myriad of ways, and that any word or expression can be the candidate of the category, and as such exonerations cannot be nailed down to certain words or expressions. Analysts suggest instead to view exonerations as explanations given when people are in some trouble or facing some kind of accusation, and that it is through examining their place in sequence that we can understand how exonerative effects are produced. In this talk, I discuss such effects by considering a succession of speech events that take the form of political interviews. In such events talk is normatively oriented to the public and participants contribute relative to their roles as interviewer and interviewee. While divergences from the norm may not lead to serious social consequences, the reverse may also occur, where an interview may become an occasion for contesting moral norms. Implicated within such an occasion are not only the participants from whose turns at talk exonerations emerge but also the audience who participate in moral negotiation by commenting on what has been said – including through labeling – and circulating their comments beyond the event. The Indonesian interviews studied here show that adopting a third-person’ perspective in referring to oneself and inviting others to participate in the exonerative talk are among the neutralization techniques adopted by participants. A methodological implication from the study is that structural analysis (i.e., based on sequence) needs to be complemented by a reflexive-semiotic perspective to better reflect the participation framework within political interviews.

About the Speaker

Novi Djenar is an Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests lie in questions related to the way language facilitates understanding of sociocultural and political ideas, including ideas about self-other relations, identity, and style. Novi has published in the areas of discourse and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and grammar, focusing on Indonesian. Her book Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (with M. Ewing and H. Manns) approaches the study of youth interaction through the concept of sociability. Her current research draws on the semiotic-reflexive approach for analyzing self-addressee reference (developed with Jack Sidnell in Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations Across Southeast Asian Speech Communities) to examine how Indonesians argue and give explanations in public.