Carnival Speech Genres and the Everyday Undoing of Final Vocabularies: A Dialogic-Pragmatic Reading

This paper argues that carnivalesque speech genres (gossip, mockery, parody, foolery, ironic compliance, festive inversion) are constitutive of ordinary life in ways psychology has been ill-equipped to recognize. Drawing on Bakhtin’s account of speech genres, dialogism, and carnival, and, in a constructed encounter, Rorty’s notion of final vocabularies, we develop a dialogic-pragmatic reading of how hegemonic discourses are produced and how their finality is loosened. The resources for suspending any vocabulary that presents itself as final are internal to discourse itself: speech genres are dialogically constituted, and carnivalesque genres are where this property becomes most clearly observable. The argument proceeds through three cases (gossip in everyday sociability, the 2019 Chilean estallido social , and hospital clowning in paediatric care), each showing a different hegemonic register made audible as one register among others. It closes by reframing solidarity as the immediate pragmatic effect of these collective suspensions, and by treating the risible, the ridiculous, and the ordinary as analytic categories rather than topics, which enlarges cultural analysis. A psychology attentive to carnival speech better describes how communities recognize their own dominant discourses and resist the pull toward the monologue that institutional life tends to consolidate.