Стереотип времена у дискурсу расељених лица са Косова и Метохије

Abstract

In 2002, two institutes of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA), the Institute for the Serbian Language and the Institute for Balkan Studies, started a UNESCO-supported project: Research of Slavic Vernaculars in Kosovo and Metohija. The project resulted in an archive of audio recordings made both with displaced persons and with those still living in enclaves in Kosovo. The Corpus extracted for the purpose of the study The Stereotype of Time in the Discourse of Displaced Persons from Kosovo and Metohija comprises 142 pages of transcribed data from 40 selected interviews. The transcribed Corpus was then shaped into 297 fragments defined by the topic of conversation: 199 fragments from the interviews with female, and 98 with male participants. The part published in this study comprises only a small number of examples considered by the author as the most representative of these fragments. As the interviewed persons were predominantly illiterate or functionally illiterate people coming from rural communities of Kosovo and Metohija (with a few exceptions coming from urban environments such as Priština or Prizren), all conversations were held in Serbian vernaculars, some of them very distant from standard Serbian.

From the very beginning of our work on the research topic as it is articulated in the title, a number of methodologically inspired questions needed answers. Firstly, we sought to answer the question as to what was distinctive in the discourse of displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija as compared to the discourse of persons still living in the enclaves in Kosovo and Metohija. Secondly, we addressed the question of extracting a special corpus out of the extensive material collected during the project Research of Slavic Vernaculars in Kosovo and Metohija, a corpus on which to base our analysis. For the purpose of our study, we used the conversations from the Audio Archive of the above-mentioned project that are focused on the interlocutors’ experiences relating to the war (of 1999), displacement, and new life conditions. Being spatially dislocated, displaced persons consider the war period as a zero point on the timeline of their lives; hence the past, present and future are determined in relation to this reference point. It does not mean that persons living in the enclaves in Kosovo and Metohija do not locate events in relation to the war, but rather that those who were displaced move within a quite distinctive spatio-temporal coordinate system. The study The Stereotype of Time in the Discourse of Displaced Persons from Kosovo and Metohija is divided into two parts. The first part ofers a description of the theory and methodology applied: a review of contemporary fieldwork in Serbia both in linguistics and in humanities as a whole, a review of the theoretical frameworks of cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and different approaches to taxis constructions. Having in mind time as the focus of the study, a theoretical discussion on time is included as well. The Corpus was analyzed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The very examples, however, required the formal linguistic approach as well, which means that the analysis of the Corpus is characterized by pluralism of analytical methods. The second, analytical, part of the study is divided into four main chapters, whose purpose was to identify the category of temporal boundary and the conceptual categories of the present, past and future, in order to be able to look at their manifestation in language. In identifying and defining the temporal boundary, it has been assumed that there is in every narrative of displaced persons a prototypical concept of displacement, given the individually experienced character of every event associated with the displacement. Regardless of their personal experience of displacement, most of the interviewed persons mark the war, bombing and displacement (of 1999) as a hypothetical boundary on their life timeline. This boundary can therefore be seen as a stereotype. The definitions of prototype and stereotype are adopted from Ljudmila Popović. Even though the war/bombing/displacement is experienced in different ways by different persons, nearly all recorded narratives and discourses analyzed for the purpose of this study have something in common: it is exactly this event (war/bombing/displacement) that, even if verbalized in different ways, marks the boundary between past and present. Utterances of the interlocutors displaced from Kosovo and Metohija during 1999 locate certain events and states in time in relation to the war and bombing, and they do so in terms of their being anterior or posterior to the temporal boundary expressed by the lexemes war and bombing. The use of these lexemes in prepositional phrases, the system of taxis constructions, and contexts in which these lexemes are used, as well as the meaning which can be read from the discourse, indicate their synonymy. Through the process of metonymic transfer the lexeme bombing acquires the meaning “war”, as well as “the beginning of the war”. The temporal boundary stereotype is expressed by verbs of motion, the center of the stereotype is expressed by the verb to come (came), while the fact that the verb is used in the past tense indicates that the speaking person places the action in the past. Modern ways of expressing time and temporal relationships, such as dates, days of the week and years, which are used in the discourse of displaced persons to mark a temporal boundary, may be thought of as prototypical. The examples from our Corpus show that interviewers insist on the precise localization of event(s) in time, which interlocutors, however, are sometimes unable to do. They often spontaneously use nonstandard temporal markers, a fact that is consistent with our hypothesis about differences in the very understanding of time. These differences are considered to arise from interviewees and interviewers having different mental patterns and ways of understanding time. The concept of the present is delimited as a fragment by two reference points on the timeline, one point being the moment of speech, the other being the moment of displacement, i.e. the temporal boundary (singled out in the discourse). In that sense, the conceptual category of the present is defined as the section of the timeline from the temporal boundary to the moment of speech. What is regularly observable within the conceptual category of the present – given the focus of conversation on reconstructing traditional culture and language, as well as the interlocutors’ need to talk about a part of their reality – is the mixed use of the past and present tenses, even their use in various meanings; in all that, the meaning of verbs should not be neglected either. A change of perspective from which events are looked at is also observable in the discourse – on the one hand, the interlocutors focus on the moment of speech, which results in looking at the present as a temporal fragment around the point in time at which the conversation takes place. On the other hand, the present is seen as the temporal fragment which extends from the moment of displacement to the moment of speech, and which, given its actual duration, includes situations, events and states that are perceived as past ones. Taking into account the extensive character of the concept of the present, which, in real time, includes a fragment of the past, the use of tenses within this conceptual category is not essentially different from their use in the conceptual category of the past. The verb in the predicate is considered to be a stereotype of the category of temporality. On the conceptual level, however, Corpus examples show that the notion of the present is typically verbalized by using the temporal adverb now. Namely, Corpus examples show that the temporal adverb now is highly frequent and that it occurs even in phrases where the past tense is used, as well as in discourse fragments for which only the past tense is used. Moreover, examples reveal not only that the temporal adverb now can transfer its primary meaning (“at the present time”) to other temporal fragments, but also that this manner of its use modifies its primary meaning in such a way that the adverb acquires a dimension of duration. By introducing the dimension of meaning “present” into the discourse delimited by the moment of displacement as a temporal boundary on one side and the moment of speech on the other, this adverb, regardless of the tense used, becomes representative of the stereotypical notion of the present in the discourse of displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija. The conceptual category of the past is defined as a temporal fragment on the timeline delimited by a temporal boundary on only one side, a boundary expressed through displacement. Given that there is only one boundary, the temporal fragment included in the category of the past remains undefined. The reason for this way of expressing the past might be in the fieldwork methodology used – the conversational focus was on traditional culture, which led to a predomination of (auto)biographical narratives and rituals associated with traditional culture in the discourse relating to the conceptual category of the past. As regards the topics in the discourse that belongs to the conceptual category of the past, two types of time conceptualization are observable – cyclic and linear. Linear time occurs along the length of the timeline; it moves from the past towards the future, and each moment has its own characteristics and can only occur once. The concept of linear time is observable in (auto)biographical stories. The concept of cyclic time appears to be more frequent, as our conversation mostly revolved around traditional culture. The concept of cyclic time is expressed in several different ways; that is, depending on the topic, several types of cycles may be identified. One of the cycles is the calendar cycle, and by this we mean the calendar of traditionally observed holidays. It is characterized by situations and activities repeated every year on every one of these holidays. It may be assumed that the sequence of actions and situations, as well as their duration, is always identical. The other cycle is the annual cycle associated with the seasonal activities that the displaced persons carried out in their communities before their displacement. The actions classified as cyclic are repeated within every activity – sowing, harvesting, mowing, etc. A third cycle observed in the study is the daily cycle, given that the daily organization of time also involves repetitive elements. Although a day may be thought of as a line running from morning to evening, as it does in the linear concept of time, there are, within daily activities, situations and actions that are repeated day after day. A forth cycle is the life cycle. Although life may be conceived of as a line that begins at birth and ends at death, and each moment in life as unique and unrepeatable, the life cycle is also seen here as a collection of a number of situations and actions occurring in everybody’s life – situations and actions characteristic of every wedding, funeral, birth, baptism, and other similar elements of traditional culture. In that sense, the type of time characterizing these elements of traditional culture is cyclic. Apart from four main cycles identified depending on the topics discussed with interlocutors, there are some situations in which time can also be classified as cyclic. It is a fact that even linear and cyclic times can overlap one another; that is, that there are in certain cycles actions that can be classified as linear. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to identify a precise boundary between the two types of time, linear and cyclic. Our analysis of the discourse fragments belonging to the conceptual category of the past is based on the way in which events are described by the interlocutors. In keeping with the topics, a chronologically ordered description of events and the expressing of habitual actions seem to predominate. Apart from the use of the past tense, which represents the stereotype of the category of the past, the simple present and future tenses are also frequently employed. The present tense serves a narrative function, to express habitual actions in the past and for giving instructions. The simple future tense serves two functions: one is to express habitual actions in the past, and in that case it is alternately used with the present tense; the other is to give instructions, where it also alternates with the present tense. In the conceptual category of the past, chronological order is highlighted as an important characteristic in expressing past events. Except for the past tense and the variously used present tense occurring successively in order to state past events in a chronological order, chronology and succession are also expressed by means of discourse markers. The study points to the use of the discourse marker of the beginning, the discourse markers after, then, and, as well as to the use of various discourse markers in a single discourse fragment. Finally, the study looks into the conceptual category of the future, which is delimited on only one side of the timeline by the moment of speech, i.e. by the conceptual category of the present. Briefly, all events and situations on the timeline located after the moment of speech belong to the conceptual category of the future. This category does not have the “other” boundary; there is no moment that could serve to delimit it in the future. Thus, this conceptual category, like that of the past, is characterized by indefinite temporal extension. Unlike the conceptual categories of present and past, however, the Corpus yielded only few examples of the conceptual category of the future. One of the reasons is the fieldwork methodology – the conversational focus was on the past, on the traditional culture as it had been practiced in the past or until the moment of displacement, and on the change of living conditions. None of the questions intentionally concerned the interlocutors’ future and/or plans for the future. Namely, it was believed that their present circumstances made that kind of questions both inappropriate and likely to cause emotional reactions. Even so, we compiled the examples of the use of the future tense for referring to the temporal fragment after the moment of speech. Neither the examples with the simple future tense used in direct speech, nor those whose reference point was in the past (the relative use of the future tense) were taken into account. In most cases, situations expressed by the simple future tense are associated with uncertainty, that is – interlocutors express uncertainty about what might happen in the future.