The Poetic Rites of Conversation

Abstract

Folkloric semiosis, the fashioning of verbal, kinesic, or material signs in traditional performance settings, customarily involves the production of stylized messages in which "the sign vehicle becomes an aspect of the expression form."' In verbal folklore performances, the medium of expression itself, the spoken word with its attendant semantic coding, becomes an object of deliberate focus. The resulting speech exhibits, in greater or lesser degree, what Roman Jakobson defines as the poetic function of language, a "focus on the message for its own sake." The study of verbal folklore is thus one branch of poetics, the overarching study of poetic or verbal artistic composition.