Metaphor in South African tsotsitaal, SOAS, University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2015-03-09

http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This Linguistics seminar titled "Metaphor in South African tsotsitaal" was given by Ellen Hurst (University of Cape Town) on 20 January 2015 at SOAS, University of London

More about this event: http://bit.ly/195kbpv
Halliday’s concept of ‘anti-language’ has been applied to a number of African Urban Youth Languages (AUYLs) in recent literature. Halliday described the concept of anti-language as a language generated by an ‘anti-society’ which is set up as a conscious alternative to established societal norms. Anti-language, then, is a conscious alternative to the language of the wider society and it distinguishes itself primarily through relexicalisation (the principle of same grammar, different vocabulary) and metaphor. Halliday states that in an anti-language, metaphor goes ‘all the way up and down the system’ – that an anti-society is a metaphorical variant of society, an anti-language is a metaphor for an everyday language, and the language itself employs metaphorical variants to distinguish it, including phonological metaphors, grammatical metaphors (morphological, lexical and syntactic) and semantic metaphors.
This paper presents natural speech data from a multi-sited research project in South Africa, in order to analyse the use of metaphor intsotsitaal – the South African AUYL used amongst peers in South Africa’s townships. The analysis considers how metaphor is used at three different levels – the level of lexical items; phrases; and social structure. Processes of innovation and creativity will be described, and the paper will evaluate the use of the term ‘anti-language’ to describe tsotsitaal (and, by implication, other AUYLs). The findings suggest that the term is a useful one to understand the metaphorical processes in AUYLs, but that it needs to be cautiously applied.