SERIOUS PLAY: VERBAL ART AND PERFORMANCE

Language speaker-listeners do not merely mouth sounds or put together syntax; they perform to affect an audience. Anthropologists since Boas's time have written extensively about how speaker-listeners use language to amuse, amaze, persuade, and seduce. Joel Sherzer catalogs puns, jokes, word games, and poetry using examples from several languages. Josef Stern argues that the ability to understand metaphor is a rule-ordered part of language competence, rather than extra-linguistic idiosyncratic. Paulla A. Ebron looks at the ways Africans present themselves as verbal performers in various settings, focusing on Gambian jail musicians.