Page 209 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

184 Bel et al.

music, whereas women of lower status are more inclined to assert a
‘personal commitment’ to singing, thereby emphasizing the strength
and personality of their voices, apparently at the cost of tunefulness.
The reality is much more complex because the same woman may not
sing in the same style on her own and in unison with other performers.
As a rule, group singing seems to be conducive to achieving the standard
of records of popular songs, including bhajan (devotional), gawalan
(popular devotional) and grindmill songs, available in village shops
and pilgrimage places.
Thus, we may expect to find several types of ‘signatures’ in the corpus
of recorded grindmill songs: collective signatures emphasizing the
performer’s legitimate status as a member of a group (womanhood,
village, caste, and so on), and individual signatures reflecting a pro-
cess of appropriation of the act of speaking/singing. Among explicit
collective signatures comes the stereotyped utterance ‘I tell you,
woman’, defining a style of enunciation characteristic of the tradition
of grindmill songs.
It does not stand as an utterance for one’s own sake, private benefit
or solitary satisfaction. It is a human agency where speech as an
act tends to establish an interpersonal relation, a binding rapport
between subjects. The addressee is therefore called to grant an active
welcome to the testimony of an addressor who speaks out towards
somebody. (Poitevin and Rairkar 1996: 256)
The background hypothesis of our research is that personal styles
might be the outcome of trade-offs between ‘music’ and ‘language’;
namely, the normative framework of a tune against the fluctuant
manifestations of prosody in the subjective dimensions of speech com-
munication. Further, performers make use of specific musical effects
to elaborate discursive elements that may support, and sometimes
contradict, the discursive content of the song lyrics.
Communication in spontaneous speech bears some resemblance
with singing at the grindmill both in terms of commitment of the
speaker and the listener’s adaptation to inaccurate syntax. The main
parameters manipulated by speakers to enhance expressiveness are
the ones belonging to the domain of speech prosody, both ‘lexical’
(word stress, tone and quantity) and supra-segmental or ‘non-lexical’
(intonation proper) (Hirst and Di Cristo 1998: 5ff).