References to place and time are an ordinary part of everyday talk. We locate persons, things and events for different purposes, e.g., to provide directions, to tell someone to find something, to describe what they see, to... [ view full abstract ]
References to place and time are an ordinary part of everyday talk. We locate persons, things and events for different purposes, e.g., to provide directions, to tell someone to find something, to describe what they see, to recollect an experience. This paper explores the inter-related notions of place and boundary as they emerge in interaction. Place and boundaries are considered here in terms of both spatial and experiential dimensions. I analyse informal conversations among Indonesian youth to show how boundary emerges from interactional contingencies in which personal experience and shared spatial knowledge are invoked through talk. In these conversations, boundaries are associated with unpleasant experiences, unfamiliarity, or involvement in unacceptable social practices. Young people typically talk about these lightheartedly. I argue that talking about undesirable experiences in a jocular manner is a way of promoting and maintaining sociability.
This study is theoretically grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and the philosophical work of Jeff Malpas (e.g., 1999, 2012, 2015) and Edward Casey (2017) on the phenomenology of place. Previous sociolinguistic studies on the relation between language and place have examined in detail the relation between place and dialect, mobility, time and identity. Much less attention has been devoted to the discussion of boundary and limit, particularly beyond their geographical sense. By examining the ways in which experiences of boundary and limit emerge and are made sense of through interaction, this study contributes to growing body of research on language and place, and the variability of experience. In showing that young people typically talk about undesirable experiences in a jocular manner it also contributes to the understanding of how sociability is constituted through interaction.
References
Casey, Edward S. 2017. The world on edge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Malpas, J. 1999. Place and experience: A philosophical topography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Malpas, J. 2012. Heidegger and the thinking of place: Explorations in the topology of being. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Malpas, Jeff. 2015. Place and singularity. In Jeff Malpas (ed.), The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics, 65-92. Bloomsbury Publishing.
