This panel brought together researchers
interested in the way that language varieties are represented in film,
television and literature in order to explore how they are imagined and
constructed, and, to some extent at least, designed to be received. This
construction, indeed, reflection, of naturally occurring varieties is
worth exploring for the insight it gives us into their sociopragmatic profile:
for example, comparing represented discourse with naturally occurring discourse
is illuminating in terms of identifying what features of linguistic systems are
perceived as emblematic of a variety. Represented varieties can be examined as
standalone artefacts and/or they may be contrasted with naturally occurring
data, such as corpora of specific language varieties, in order to make visible
significant alignments and departures between the two. Present-day access to
large-scale corpora of ‘authentic’ language (bearing in mind that ‘authentic’
is a contested and contestable concept) has afforded significant insights into
the sociopragmatic profile of spoken varieties, led to developments in our
understanding of language-in-use in ways that confirm and challenge intuition,
and allowed for the systematic development methodological and theoretical
paradigms, such as variational pragmatics (e.g. Schneider and Barron 2008).
However, the practical and ethical issues involved in accessing certain
locations of (spoken) language data appears to preclude investigation of many
potentially interesting language phenomena: using represented language data,
with certain caveats of course, can go some way towards mitigating these
difficulties of access. Amador-Moreno and McCafferty have pointed out – in
relation to fictionalised orality, something is pertinent to this panel discussion
–“for interactive talk in fiction to be understood, it must be interpretable in
terms of the same rules of discourse that govern everyday verbal interaction”
(2011: 1). It is this aspect that is so intriguing – the processes by which
everyday talk is represented, and the potential of represented varieties to
give us oblique access to language-in-use across boundaries of time, geography
and community.