ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on archival material, and describes work by Miyako Inoue on “Japanese women’s language” and Robert Moore on “Irish English accent.” Narrating events in archival studies are more obviously cross-event phenomena, because they involve linked events of production and reception. Kyuichi Takeuchi, a famous Japanese sculptor, connects categories of persons and categories of speech. In the narrated event, Takeuchi describes “former geisha” and “respectable mothers and daughters.” Takeuchi describes a social change: geisha come to populate upper-class society, becoming respectable women themselves, and, over time, this changes how respectable women and girls speak. By the early 1900s, Japanese schoolgirls were understood to speak a common language called “schoolgirl speech” or “teyo-dawa speech.” Quoted speech and several evaluative indexicals characterize the Irishman as poor and ignorant. Other evaluative indexicals and the metapragmatic expression “convulsions of laughter” characterize the judge and jury as serious people who cannot help but explode into hilarity at the ignorant Irishman’s error.
