This project aims to collect and characterize a wide variety of ‘bata’ (wish-blessings) from different social contexts and domains across Kazakhstan. Traditionally, bata blessings are given by elder relatives, to younger members of the family to support them through every major important event in their life’s journey. Bata thus represents a component of terbiye, the cultural upbringing of a person. However, bata as a verbal practice moves through many new and different circumstances, where a variety of actors take up the role of proverbial authority or ‘advice-giver,’ to a new series of audiences and recipients. In this project we look not only at bata given in the contexts of home and family, but as well as the bata given to pilgrims at shrines and sacred sites, the bata given (or received) by local and national authorities as a part of their political platform, and at the new creative ways which Kazakh musicians and rappers incorporate the theme and verbal practice in their art. Using the framework of ethnomethodology in linguistic anthropology, in this project we analyze the participant frameworks and pragmatic ends of an evolving oral tradition: how do new practitioners utilize the respect and cultural value inherent to these wishes, to give blessings to a new generation?

The project aims to (re)theorize tellability (a story’s worthiness of being told) as a translational category that characterizes all, not only verbal, narratives. By exploring how Western classical music becomes a tellable subject matter in drama and graphic literature (Adrienne Kennedy’s She Talks to Beethoven and Brandon Montclare, Frank Marraffino and various artists’ 2020 comic book The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology, respectively) and by exposing a notorious 2007 film noire (Alexey Balabanov’s Gruz 200) as a suppressed adaptation of a scandalous 1931 American novel (William Faulkner’s Sanctuary), the project seeks to uncover the fundamental capacity of narrative for change (its translationality) across media and cultures.

The project considers the respective roles of pragmatic and prosodic factors in disambiguating scope-related semantic ambiguities, as in I did not invite all my distant relatives, which could mean either ‘I did not invite any of my distant relatives’ and ‘I invited only some of my distant relatives’, depending on the scopes of negation and universal quantifier. Traditionally, it has been assumed that negation scopes over focus, and in languages like Russian or English focus is prosodically marked. Therefore, one would expect that in oral speech, disambiguation is based on prosody. However, a corpus study of actual production demonstrates that there are no distinct prosodic patterns consistently associated with either wide or narrow scope readings. This leads one to hypothesize that speakers rely on other strategies for disambiguation. The project studies the respective contributions of pragmatic and prosodic factors in the production and comprehension of ambiguous sentences in a series of experiments. Currently, the Russian language experiments are finished and interpreted, English language experiments are ongoing, and we consider other potential languages to include in this cross-linguistic comparison.