Diglossia, the existence of two language varieties within the same language community, can be used for humorous effect under certain conditions. Although linguistic approaches to humor are not widely available or formalized, it is possible to use a number of key concepts such as scripts, incongruity , and surprise , in relation to such sociolinguistic concepts as high and low varieties of language, in an attempt to explain why texts are funny. The work of Elena Akrita, a member of the new generation of Greek humorists, provides numerous instances of texts that are based on what I will call diglossic humor . Should one wish to poke fun at a once-revered language variety, that variety must have been "vilified" and thereby have lost its status. This is indeed the case with katharévusa, as Akrita's humor shows.
This paper investigates aspects of the Linguistic Landscape of central Belgrade between 2009 and 2017, theorizing its findings at the intersection of sociolinguistics, ethnography, and semiotics, which has gained ground as the platform of choice in "second wave" linguistic landscape (LL) research. It focuses on dynamic indexical relations between space and language in the framework of superdiversity, as a way of making sense of language-in-society. To this end, it problematizes how ideologically laden identitarian concerns (such as digraphia/double literacy but also Christian Orthodoxy and heteronormativity as an index of srpstvo) find their way onto Stari Grad walls. Such concerns have considerable-and often lasting-effects on the LL which can only be adequately investigated by systematic ethnographic studies of the semiotic means employed in inscribing it.
In this paper I focus on MGrlίγo‘(a) little’ in non-quantifying constructions codifying affect and argue that it has grammaticalized from a quantifier to an (inter)subjective metalinguistic hedging device: i.e., a positive politeness marker in thehedged directive constructionand a marker of attitude to one’s own utterance in thehedged statement construction. Motivation for this development is provided by MGr interactional ethos and the importance attached to the friendly, informal “politeness of involvement”, a factor discussed in the context of universal tendencies in the semantics of diminutives and affective language. I argue that non-quantifyinglίγois a case of semantic change motivated by sociopragmatic considerations which are anchored to specific constructions.
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