Т. 2. Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность

Секция африканистов: «Чтения памяти Д. А. Ольдерогге» Asia and Africa: their Heritage and Modernity. Vol. 2 243 encoding of agency “takes place in empirical vacuum” of constructed examples rather than on actual language use. 1 There is little research on the encoding of agency in multilingual naturally occurring interactions, especially involving non- European languages. This talk addresses the question of linguistic encoding of agency in Swahili-English discourse in urban Kenya, where both languages enjoy the status of official languages. The data comes from a popular televised opinion program called Matatu Show where participants are ordinary Kenyans discussing current affairs and socially relevant issues. Three 15-minute long episodes from 2011, 2012, and 2015 on the topic of family planning were selected as a productive site for studying linguistic means for indexing gender and expressing agentive power amid code-switching. Whereas previous research focused on the role of transitivity in preforming agency in Swahili, 2 this study finds that the encoding of gender and agency entails certain lexical choices, as well as the use of certain grammatical structures and code-switching. In the analyzed data, while male and female participants equally engage in the discussion, they use different linguistic strategies for talking about their experiences and expressing opinions. Male speakers regularly use predicative expressions and code-switching referencing development discourse, in addition to taking the semantic role of agent. In contrast, female agency is indexed as personal and idiosyncratic through lexical means and by taking the semantic role of patient or undergoer. In doing so, female speakers limit the potential for generalizing their experiences beyond the personal and into the public domain of shared knowledge. The analysis reveals that the linguistic encoding of agency employed by the speakers index unequal gender roles. 3 While men are assigned the discursive agency around decision-making in family planning, women are in effect expected to take agentive actions discretely. This study contributes to the theoretical research on agency in multilingual interactions, as well as provides empirical insights on agency in developmental discourse, including public health campaigns. 1 Duranti A. Performance and encoding of agency in historical-natural languages. The Texas Linguistic Forum, 44, 266–287 (n.d.). 2 Whiteley W. H . Some problems of transitivity in Swahili. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1968; Zheltov A. Y. Nenominativnost v Niger-Congo [Non-nominative features in Niger-Congo languages]. Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, 1 (2010). P. 70–82. 3 Ochs E. Indexing gender // A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. P. 335–358.