Mere Noise or More than Noise?

The Interactional Entextualization of Signs in a Rural Encounter

Abstract

This paper starts off from ethnographic data collected in the still diglossic rural hinterlands known as the Bourbon Mountains (Montagne bourbonnaise) in Central France. Looking at what goes on interactionally during a seemingly liminal and marginal sequence when an elderly speaker misreads a reminder note for our next informal meeting, it shows how through interactionally identifying some signs as being irrelevant (mere noise) and others as deserving attention (more than noise), speakers also define what is going on in the broader social context, i.e., interactional text-in-context. To do so I draw from Paris School semiotics’ concepts of “modes of existence” and particularly potentialization (Greimas and Fontanille 1991), as well as analytics from semiotically informed linguistic anthropology, particularly entextualization (Silverstein and Urban 1996).