The indexical value of lexical borrowing in a ‘remembrance culture’-community of practice: German loanwords in Belgian WWII-testimonies

• Main Authors: Kim Schoofs, Dorien Van De Mieroop
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2019-01-01
• Series: Ampersand
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039019300104

In this study, we scrutinize the locally constructed indexical value of German loanwords in Belgian WWII-testimonies. We argue that these testimonies are situated in a specific WWII-remembrance context which forms a community of practice with its own local style. In particular, we selected three Flemish (i.e. Dutch) and three Walloon (i.e. French) spoken testimonies from our testimony-corpus. Methodologically, we draw on multimodal discourse analysis and carry out qualitative micro-analyses which focus on the discursive features and the sequential characteristics of the data as well as the – verbal and non-verbal – performance features of the context surrounding the German loanwords. The analyses illustrate that narrators incorporate loanwords for their indexical value which invokes the social context, for their highly context-specific semantic value, as contextualization cues for reported speech which then invokes social groups, or a mixture of these options. Overall, the analyses demonstrate on the one hand that, in general, the level of integration into the narrative flow is a good indicator of the German loanwords' function in our testimony-data. At the far-ends of this continuum, loanwords were either highly integrated indexical markers of the social context, or gesturally and prosodically distinguishable markers of the social outgroup. On the other hand, our microscopic analyses also uncovered the opportunities of the fuzziness of this continuum, illustrating these German loanwords’ ephemeral indexical value and their endless potential to create unique social meanings within their community of practice. Keywords: Indexicality, Lexical borrowing, Multimodal discourse analysis, Community of practice, Belgian WWII-testimonies, German