Parallelism and the Composition of Oral Narratives in Banda Eli

Roman Jakobson defines (1977 [1919]:25) parallelism as "le rapprochement de deux unités" ("the bringing together of two elements"; translation quoted in Fox 1988:3) so that they are perceived and interpreted in relation to one another. Parallelism is most obvious as a feature of formal, poetic style, and within this context it serves as a poetic function that projects the equivalence of two sound patterns or meanings from the axis of selection ("ladies," "gentlemen," "friends," "colleagues," "readers," and so on) to the axis of combination ("Ladies and Gentlemen!" (Jakobson 1960:358). The resulting message stands out as an image of the kind of language and behavioral control required by such occasions as public address, funeral, or worship. In this sense parallelism and related poetic resources contribute to the holistic organization of discourse that signifies an appropriate register of interaction (Kataoka 2012:105). When parallelism is present in artistic, public, and ritual domains of language use, it reflects conscious, aesthetic categories of language practice; at the same time its use reflects the speakers' ability to align their self-presentation and status with those categories. This begs the question, how is "naturally occurring speech" organized through parallelism and related devices? How do speakers deploy these resources when framing interactions and how do they embody participant roles in them?

These questions arise from my study of an Eastern Indonesian linguistic minority that is centered on two villages in the remote Kei Islands. The founders of these villages were exiled from the islands of Banda in Central Maluku when the Dutch East India Company conquered their ancestral home in 1621. For almost four centuries they have maintained a distinct language called tur wandan, or Bandanese, that presently has about 5000 speakers (Collins and Kaartinen 1998). The language's survival is threatened by mass urbanization, but it is still valued by the geographically dispersed Banda community¹ as a medium of in-group communication. During my early fieldwork among this group in the 1990s (Kaartinen 2010 and 2013), I found that parallelism was prominent in artistic and eloquent speech by those who presented themselves as mediators between the inside and outside of this linguistic and social world. These speakers, most of whom were born before the Indonesian Independence in 1945, embodied the dialogic potential underpinned by the linguistic boundary between the Banda people and outsiders. Their use of parallelistic expressions objectified a sense of Bandanese as the language of authority and wisdom that derived from personal and collective histories of long-distance maritime travel and of contacts with powerful outsiders. Urbanization and the increase in use of the national language of Indonesian in daily communication among the Bandanese have amounted to the collapse of the value-creating boundary between the village domain and what the Bandanese used to call the "world of trade." An interesting question is how the use of Bandanese as an expression of personal wit and cultural competence resonates with the contemporary experience and predicament of people using it today.

John W. Du Bois (2014:363) has emphasized the particular role of parallelism in generating dialogic resonance that encourages speakers to engage with each other's speech, adopting its structures even as they contest, subvert, or concur with its meaning. Whereas Bakhtin's (1981:259-422 and 1986:60-102) notion of dialogue focuses on the "responsive understanding" of single utterances and literary works, Du Bois (2014:369) expands his analysis to higher-order dialogic constructions that reveal how speakers revitalize and innovate potential analogies that can be produced between sequences of linguistic form and meaning. Dialogic parallelism is significant for language learning because it enhances the speakers' fluent use of particular words and structures (ibid.:380) and allows them to playfully subvert ethnic hierarchies and the social organization of speech (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005; León 2007:408). While parallelism always involves an element of repetition in that it unfolds through dialogic reiterations across turn-taking in conversation (León 2007:407), Du Bois (2014:376-402) argues that dialogic parallelism is never just "slavish" repetition or mimicry. On the contrary, a parallel choice of words...