Framing shared knowledge: The chronotopic organisation of meaning

Previous studies of interactional particles have shown that a particle's social meaning may be contextually contingent and a momentary instantiation of the form's core meaning. This paper shows how analysing particles using Blommaert and De Fina's (2017) chronotopic frame approach provides greater insight into the dialectic relationship between forms' meanings that are relatively transitory or perduring. This paper illustrates the contributions of chronotopic frame approaches by using this framework to analyse how three distinct interactionally emergent social meanings of the Pontianak Malay particle bah are connected to the particle's core meaning of ‘shared knowledge’.