The role of vocal identity as a sensible enunciative shifter

Abstract

Commonly conceptualized as a “sonic fingerprint” or “vocal identity,” timbre has been treated as an acoustic substance that can be freely replaced, like a disposable sonic covering that does not take part in linguistic meaning. This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence that challenges this assumption. First, it presents a brief review of Benveniste’s concept of enunciation and the operation of debreyage/embreyage. It then discusses how this conceptualization can be enriched by the notion of “sensitive debreyage,” more recently proposed by studies in discursive semiotics. The next step shows how voice timbre can trigger sensitive debreyages and under what conditions it produces meaning effects that are relevant from a linguistic point of view. We argue that, in certain circumstances, voice timbre operates as a first-person marker at the sensitive margin of enunciation, working together with its verbal counterparts, especially deictics. These meaning effects are observed through the practical analysis of real utterances taken from different discursive contexts, ranging from political interviews to popular songs and cinematic voice-over. The results support the analytical usefulness of distinguishing between two instances, namely, timbral overlay and linguistic-melodic substrate. Observing their joint action from an enunciative perspective brings new insights into a symbolic role of timbre that had until then been considered outdated and obsolete. Finally, future studies should also investigate and further explore the enunciatee’s interpretive doing in such enunciative operations, as well as factors related to the process of cultural formation/stabilization of timbral prototypes.