An intro to linguistics - Stanford UniversityThere are a lot of ways to study linguistics, but we’re all interested in how language works. How is it that a human can learn 栀漀眀
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An intro to linguistics Language and gender Tyler Schnoebelen Kyuwon Moon 4 Apr 2009
Language and genderTyler SchnoebelenKyuwon Moon4 Apr 2009
What is linguistics?
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“The study of language”
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Chomsky (the smiling MIT linguist) is one of the most cited authors. He’s alongside Shakespeare, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Lenin, Marx, and Aristotle. He’s the only one still alive. Linguistics had a long past before Chomsky, but it’s safe to say that he’s dominated the field since the 1950s. Chomsky is probably famous because he introduced the idea that you could have a whole theory of language based in the brain. This got a lot of people really excited and opened up a lot of research opportunity.
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In the “old days” (which are still going on for some people), you could theorize about language just by dreaming up sentences in your armchair. Part of the tendency here is to be very empirical—so we do fieldwork, experiments, corpus searches, etc.
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The vast majority of the work at Stanford is outside Chomky’s program because people either find it (a) wrong, or (b) uninteresting. Alex works on documenting an endangered language in Yellowknife up in Canada. Stacy looks at how smiling changes vowels for Playboy bunnies. Tom helps explain how people choose between “I lifted up a piece of a paper” and “I lifted a piece of paper up”. Dan writes programs that do speech recognition. He also works on the language of food. Penny wrote one of the textbooks we’re reading. She also works on adolescent speech and an endangered language in the Pyrenees. Arnold has written about everything from Indic languages to gay male porn names. Marie has programs that can automatically detect contradictions in texts. She also studies how children acquire language. Stephanie works on rhythm and poetry. She plays a mean jazz vibraphone. Rob is pictured here biking in South America after doing some fieldwork in the Amazon. He also just wrote a paper about Australian hip-hop.
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There are a lot of ways to study linguistics, but we’re all interested in how language works. How is it that a human can learn how to understand and produce sentences they’ve never heard before? How does language use shape the world? This second part is something we’ll be looking at quite a bit as we think about the construction of gender.
What linguists ain’t
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There’s an important distinction to be made between prescription and description. Prescriptive advice is given by the grammarians—think of the school marm or the hectoring professor who insists on editing your papers with red ink. Linguists aren’t prescriptive. We don’t set up rules of grammar and say they must be abided by.
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We’re interested in describing languages, whether those are endangered Ethiopian languages or the vernacular you speak with friends in your dorm room.
(Not a linguist)
You shouldn’t end a sentence in a preposition
(Not a linguist)
You shouldn’t end a sentence in a preposition
People end sentences in prepositions all the time
Why do people say this is a
rule?
(Linguist)
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Many of you were probably talk all about these pesky “for”, “to” and “with”. You were told, “You cannot dangle your prepositions.” Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to tell you that you can. Not only can you, but in many cases you ought to. Francis Bacon dangled prepositions, Shakespeare dangled prepositions, Jane Austen dangled prepositions. Did our schoolteachers think they were wrong? This is a very natural thing to do. It feels natural to people and it has for a long time. So why the prohibition? But first another bugaboo.
To boldly go…
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“To go” is how we express “the infinitive” in English. The supposed prohibition is that you should “split the infinitive”, by putting anything in the middle. Thus “to boldly go” is terrible terrible terrible.
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“Dangled prepositions” and “split infinitives” are cherished superstitions that generations have been passing along since probably the 17th century. The rules came about because in Latin—and note that Latin is not English and that English isn’t even a daughter language of Latin—it’s practically impossible to end a sentence with a preposition. Some very enthusiastic and—well, stupid—classicists said, well Latin is great and if you can’t do it in Latin, don’t do it in English, either. The trend of teaching this is dying out, but people are often blinded by the rules they are taught and tend to make children suffer the same things they did.
DIY• What are you hitting me for?
• She knows people worth talking to.
• That depends on what they are cut with.
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Can you reword these yourself? Go ahead and try.
DIY• What are you hitting me for?
– Why are you hitting me?• (Well, this changes the sentence, but we can live with it.)
• She knows people worth talking to.– She knows people with whom it is worthwhile to talk.
• (Yuck!)
• That depends on what they are cut with.– That depends on with what they are cut.
• (Actually, a real pedant would say that this was problematic. They may insist on something like the below.)
– That depends on the answer to the question as to with what they are cut.
• (Acceptable to the schoolmarm. But awful to your ears and eye, right?)
You’ve
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You(‘ve)
Got(h)
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Got(h)
To
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To
Be
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Be(e)
Kidding
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Kidding
Me
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Me
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This is also nonsense. The people who insist on these rules are not linguists. Linguists are not, generally, interested in prescribing what the “right” thing to do is. They are interested in describing what really happens. Linguists have no problem with “ain’t” or “I’m, like, totally over this” or even “hella”. What they are interested in is who uses these sorts of things, how they are used, how they are not used. They’re interested that “I’m all, ‘You can’t take me to that movie,’ and he’s all, ‘Fine, I’ll take someone else” is here in California, but not in New York (by the way, it probably started in the Bay Area). Linguists are interested that tomorrow someone may talk about “people being flitchy” and though it may be the first time the word has been said, we’ll know what it means.
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Linguists reject the idea that any language—or dialect—is any more advanced than another. There’s no primitive language and there’s no progress as we move further. Linguists reject that any language ever achieves perfection so that any further change is just deterioration and corruption. Every language changes and no battle waged against a changed has yet succeeded. Does this mean that we now have a linguistic free-for-all where everything is possible? No. And though writing is often strongest when it imitates speech, you still need to keep certain things in mind. The language you use at home and that which you use giving a presentation or writing an e-mail to customers each have constraints. If there are rules, they are: use natural-sounding language, don’t be ambiguous unless you mean to be, don’t choose a style that’s inappropriate or distracting. If you’re writing a letter to ask the Association of Sumsimus Snobs for money, you probably shouldn’t split your infinitives—they’ll notice and be distracted by it. That’s all to say, know your audience. Find some way to say or write what you want to communicate that doesn’t turn you over backwards and make you do somersaults. Walk out of here knowing that most rules aren’t rules at all—they are superstitions up with which you do not have to put. The phrase "I plan to really enjoy the party" is perceived by native speakers as far more natural and rhythmic than possible non-split infinitive alternatives such as "I plan really to enjoy the party" and "I plan to enjoy really the party", both of which are perceived as artificial. The final possible alternative, "I plan to enjoy the party, really" actually possesses a slightly different meaning — putting the "really" on the end here shifts the meaning of the sentence to imply that the speaker is protesting against some previous suggestion that the speaker would somehow not enjoy the party. (The otherwise perfectly acceptable variation "I really plan to enjoy the party" is not relevant to this particular discussion, as the adverb here modifies the indicative verb "plan" rather than the infinitive "enjoy".) People have objected to “he’s” instead of he is, and the introduction of spurious words like jeopardize and underhanded. New ways of saying things come into a language—both as words—like email, Internet, cyberspace—and as grammar. And some things get left behind, too. For example, we don’t say, “Tis” meaning “It is” though that was acceptable for a long time.
What’s sociolinguistics?
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Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.
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Bill Labov, the big guy in sociolinguistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labov
A tentative definition
• Bright (1966) talks about sociolinguistics as being whenever two or more of these interact:– Sender identity
– Receiver identity
– Setting
– Synchronic/diachronic
– Language use vs. reports of use
– Extent of diversity
– Application
Other topics in sociolinguistics
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4. Other topics in sociolx & how gender fits in�
Ask a partner
• Milk
• Egg
• Nuclear
• Water
• Pecan
• Best kind
• Best apple
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Everyone pretty much does: bεs kaɪnd (k(h)) AAVE does bεs æpl
Dialects
• “No matter who’s doing the talking, people have an opinion about it” – American Tongues
• Variation– Everyone has an accent, but some people are in denial about it.
• Who will say they have an accent, who won’t? Why?
– Variation happens in:• Word choice (the lexicon)• Pronunciation (phonetics/phonology)• Grammar (syntax)• Meaning (semantics)
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Here’s an old dialect map of the US
Class
“Dropping g’s”
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The graph above is from Labov (1969)’s study of New York City’s East Side. The more careful your speech is, the more you say, “talking” instead of “talkin’”. But it’s also segmented by socioeconomic class. Two basic points from Rickford (1986): Sociolinguistics marched into communities with pre-made scales and needed to figure out the local system. All our work assumes a consensus model, but it isn't the only model (sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, etc have others). So what is class? Marx is the classic conflict model--societies are held together despite groups having conflicting interests. Class divisions based on status (deference, respect) and power (resources, decision-making ability, influence). (Another model is that you're either a commander or an obeyer.) Thus "social barriers and social distance give rise to class difference in language in the same way that geographic barriers and spatial distance generate geographic dialects" (Guy 1988: 39). Alternatively, a consensus model emphasizes social unity and status instead of conflict and power. The scale is more continuous, everyone shares about the same evaluation of prestige.
What might you say if…
• I told you that women in a given class speak more standardly than men.
• How would you explain that?
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What women do Labov takes certain classes as given (gender, class, etc). You explain woman as hoity-toity, so they 'lie' about their class. Gender differences are about differences in gender between feelings about class. Doesn't intend to be essentialist but is. “Categories exist and lead people to speak in certain ways.” Categories are independent. Linguistic behavior unfolds from the essence of categories. Status consciousness, covert prestige and Trudgill (who cites the only paper that says that women are more status conscious than men). We look at Wolfram (1969), which has the most consistent pattern of women being more conservative than men, although there is a cross over for upper-working class women with possessive s absence. It's a bit of a mystery. Are there constraints that explain why women have to speak more standardly? Fathers are the norm-enforcers of gender (with their sons). If you have parents in a room with kids and the kids pick up "gender inappropriate" toy, it's the father who intervenes (and especially with the sons). In play groups, it looks like the boys who enforce gender norms, not girls. (Which fits in with the idea that "male is better".) In Labov (1966), we see that for "aeh", women are more casual than men in casual speech, but less so in interview speech. Women are conservative in conservative environments, but they show a wider range of behavior in casual situations. With Labov (2001)'s study of ING, we see a "V" pattern for men, where upper working class use a lot less of the apical variant than any of the other four categories (UWC is right in the middle, hence the "V"). Women just sort of drop their usage of the apical as they move up the socioeconomic ladder. (A casual use of /ɪn/ just isn't a problem for the upper middle class men, even when they are being interviewed. It seems to be for women.)
In fact
• There are some linguistic studies that do show women speaking more standardly than men
• But people usually cite this as an unproblematic universal
• They also try to pull out “status consciousness” – But of oodles of research on status consciousness, only one has found that women > men
Race
Missy be
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIlocYE_Wc
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Missy be a freak, Missy be a mack, that's a true fact
• Imagine a cold room. The room could be cold:– All the time– Just for the time being
• If you speak Standard English, you have to go out of your way to distinguish these.
• In African American Vernacular English (well, many dialects), you can say:– The room be cold (habitually)– The room cold (right now)
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See also http://www.pbs.org/speak/education/curriculum/college/aae/#aaegra
“What a nice grammatical feature that is.”
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There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people discriminate not just based on race but on AAVE. Research shows that the more AAVE features you use in a phone call about houses or jobs, the less likely the house/job is to be available…to you. So here’s where linguists do give recommendations. First, there’s nothing wrong with any dialect or language, nothing inferior or superior about AAVE or Standard English. But language attitudes saying AAVE=ignorant persist. We hope to change that, but it’s also probably necessary to get kids to be bi-dialectal, so they can speak in AAVE at home and with friends, but they can pass standardized tests and deploy Standard English when it suits them. To get this to happen requires teachers to shift their attitudes and learn new strategies.
“But it’ll cost you jobs. And housing.”
(Prescription and description revisited)
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There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people discriminate not just based on race but on AAVE. Research shows that the more AAVE features you use in a phone call about houses or jobs, the less likely the house/job is to be available…to you. So here’s where linguists do give recommendations. First, there’s nothing wrong with any dialect or language, nothing inferior or superior about AAVE or Standard English. But language attitudes saying AAVE=ignorant persist. We hope to change that, but it’s also probably necessary to get kids to be bi-dialectal, so they can speak in AAVE at home and with friends, but they can pass standardized tests and deploy Standard English when it suits them. To get this to happen requires teachers to shift their attitudes and learn new strategies.
The minority differential in reading achievement:Average national NAEP reading score by race
160
170
180
190
200
210
220
230
240
1992 1994 1998 2000 2002 2003
White
Black
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From Bill Labov (slide and this text below): The problem we jointly face is long-standing and despite many programs and efforts the minority differential in reading achievement continues.
Some causes of reading failure
Reading failure Discouragement
Alienation
Inadequate school resources
Inadequate instruction
Inadequate family support
Inadequate knowledge of children’s language and culture
Cognitive problems
Malnutrition
Lead poisoning
Attentional disorders
Behavioral problems
Loss of confidence in the alphabet
Suspension
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From Bill Labov
Attitudes about language really matter
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Consider how you get bullied if you sound gay as an adolescent. What happens if you’re a woman who isn’t feminine enough—or is “too” feminine.
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Sociolinguistics got it starts in regional variation—dialects of different areas in England, France, the US. Obviously, if people are separated by distance or mountains, they won’t interact as much. So each local area can start talking a little different. And over time, they can get pretty different. One view is that race and class are also mountain ranges. Blacks and whites don’t interact all that much in America. Certainly the interaction between rich and poor are very restricted. There’s probably a case to be made here. But what about gender? Are women and men really on opposite sides of the Rocky’s?
Sociolinguistic Methods
• Discourse Analysis
• Conversation Analysis
• Language Attitudes
• Linguistic Variation‐Morphosyntactic Variation‐ Phonetic Variation
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Please keep in mind that the different methods are just different ways of thinking about a problem. There is no single “right approach” to any problem. Each approach has its own advantages, and possibly, disadvantages.
Discourse Analysis
• What is Discourse?‐ In other disciplines (also in linguistics)
1) What is ‘say‐able’ or ‘think‐able’ about a topic in any given political, social, historical, or cultural context
2) Where a system of power and knowledge residese.g. Discourse of Racism, Discourse of Gender
‐ In linguistics1) Language above the sentence level (Zellig Harris): a unit of
Many of you are probably familiar with the term discourse. But if you are not a linguist, you are probably more familiar with the definition of discourse in other disciplines (yes, linguists are weird). Read 1), 2). So when we say discourse of racism or discourse of gender, how does it different from just saying Racism or Gender? The term discourse of gender includes not only the concept of gender but also the linguistic and nonlinguistic social practices and ideological assumptions that together construct power of gender. Linguistic definition: there are tons of different definitions of discourse. “Language above the sentence level” would be the most basic definition of discourse that most discourse analysts would agree. Not JUST the combination of sentences though – “discourse” in linguistics entail that they are interested in the use of language in social and situational contexts.
Discourse Analysis
• Why do we need to study discourse (the level beyond sentence)?– e.g. Signs at a swimming pool (Charles Finnegan’s example)
1)Please use the toilets, not the pool.2)Pool for members only.
But, when read as part of a single discourse,Please use the toilets, not the pool. Pool for members only. (?!?)
Discourse Analysis
• Topics in Discourse Analysis1) Cohesion: Study of sets of resources for constructing relations in discourse which transcend grammatical structure (Halliday 1994: 309)
‐ Inventory of cohesive resources (Halliday and Hasan 1976)Reference: here, there, now, then; Ellipsis: Did you find it? – Yes, I did; Substitution: I like that one; Conjunction: I like the orange because it is so sweet; Lexical cohesion: What is the primary means of transportation for Stanford students? – Bicycles.
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Study of cohesion is one of the oldest topics in discourse analysis. It is the study of, roughly speaking, discourse grammar. This looks for the resources that construct cohesive relations in discourse. Research question: “What makes a discourse different from a random collection of sentences?” In Halliday and Hasan’s classical study, Cohesion in English, they listed the inventory of cohesive resources. Reference: refer to the place, time, or things. Ellipsis: delete the repeated items. Conjunction: and, but, because, for, thus… make a logical relation between two sentences or clauses. Lexical cohesion: makes relation between the two lexically related words - The research tradition initiated by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Systemic functional grammar is concerned primarily with the choices that the grammar makes available to speakers and writers.[1] These choices relate speakers' and writers' intentions to the concrete forms of a language. Traditionally the "choices" are viewed in terms of either the content or the structure of the language used.
Discourse Analysis
• Topics in Discourse Analysis2) Discourse MarkersWords like 'well', 'oh', 'but', and 'and' that break up the speech into parts and show the relation between parts
‐ Marks the functions and types of speeche.g. Do you know when John is coming back? –Oh, he’s not home yet? (‘oh’ as a marker of new or unexpected information to a recipient)
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- Markers add new meanings to discourse However, these markers don't necessarily mean what the dictionary says they mean. Some people use 'and' just to start a new thought (I am taking language and gender class this quarter. Really? How’s it like? It’s alright. And I’m going to Susan’s party tonight. Are you coming?), and some people put 'but' at the end of their sentences, as a way of trailing off gently. although oh is a mere exclamation…
Conversation Analysis
• What is Conversation Analysis (CA)?
‐ Study of natural conversation and its structure
‐ Spoken interaction is systematically ordered in all its facets (Sacks 1984: 21‐27)
• Assumptions of CA
(i) Talk is a form of action; (ii) Action is structurally organized; (iii) Talk is central to intersubjectivity (Heritage, 1984).
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Importance of conversation (as Lauren mentioned): Conversation is the most crucial part of human interaction. (all kinds of communication is basically the extension of conversation!). Conversation analysis focuses on the extremely detailed investigation of conversations, based on the recordings of natural conversation and the fine-grained transcription of it. CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, in institutional (school, hospital, court…) or casual conversation. Assumptions of CA: (i) speech act (ii) action, in other words, the talks in conversation, are structurally organized to convey the meanings and intentions: leads to technical specifications of the rules and practices that structure talk-in-interaction, independent of particular speaker characteristics (iii) rather than understanding intersubjectivity (what the subjects share) as some psychological phenomena it is seen as depending on displayed understanding of prior talk. If a person answers a question, it tells that the hearer understood the prior speech act as a question. If a person laughs at a joke, it tells that the hearer understands and appreciates the joke. - The assumptions are important because only based on the assumption the structure of conversation, regardless of the speakers’ own characteristics, can be constructed.
Conversation Analysis
• Structure of conversation: structural components
‐ Turn‐taking
‐ Adjacency pairs
‐ Repair
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The system or the structure of conversation is the essential topic (backbones) in CA Turn-taking: how do we recognize the turns in conversation? In other words, how do we carry on our conversation without letting the other know that you’re finished, and it is their turn to speak? Adjacency pairs: question-answer, apology-taking it, etc. Repair: correcting the previous speech (self-initiated and the other-initiated)
Conversation Analysis
• Transcription and AnalysisE.g. ‘noticing’ (Pomerantz, 1980) 1 [phone rings] 2 Receiver Hello:: 3 Caller HI::: 4 Receiver Oh:hi:: 'ow are you Agne::s 5 Caller Fine. Yer line's been busy 6 Receiver Yeuh my fu(hh) ‐ 'hhh my father‘s7 wife called me [...etc..]
‐> Line 5, “Yer line’s been busy” is no news to the receiver. Still, in the next turn, the receiver responds with excuses (Line 6‐7, “my father’s wife called me…”)
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Also, the fine-grained transcription is very important in CA!
Conversation Analysis
• Gender in Conversation Analysis01 Emm: How’r you:02 Ear: Fine’ow’r you Emma yih wan’talk tih Lottie03 (0.2)04 Emm: Uh ya:h WELL ↑LI [:STEN sh]e’s busy I’ll [call’er ]05 Ear: [ He:re. ] [No: she]’s06 right he:re waitaminit.07 (0.3)08 Ear: Wayamin’ hol’ it.09 (1.0)10 ((receiver down))11 (5.0)12 ((receiver up))13 Lot: Ye:ah.(Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2008)
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Look at this conversation. Emma: female, Lottie’s friend. Earl: Lottie’s husband. Emma called to talk to Lottie. If you only look at the line 4-5, this seems like a typical example of male domination by interrupting female speech. (On the difference of female/male speech patterns, it has been claimed by some scholars that men interrupt more than women, and they use the interruption to dominate the situation. I think someone pointed that out during the discussion in our last class?) But, consider the whole situation. Emma called to talk to Lottie, but she sensed that they had other company at home with them (probably by noise through the phone). So she hesitated to ask for Lottie on the phone, and tried to tell Earl that she could call at some other time. Earl interrupted and made her not finish her turn, and got Lottie on the phone. So, this is not the example of male domination. Rather, Earl’s interruption is implemented as an helpful action in Emma’s point of view. (Also, notice that Earl repeated “wait a minute” two times to make Emma another turn, to make sure there is no further response from Emma (Because if Emma really does not want to talk to Lottie at this time, she would say something in her turn.).
Language Attitude
• What is Language Attitude?
‐ Study of the population at large, or a segment thereof, to try to determine what people's attitudes are about language or language‐related issues (bilingualism, language varieties, language change, etc.)
Ask people around you!
‐What do you think about Southern English/Californian English? How do they sound to you?
Language Attitudes
• Lambert et al.’s (1960) Matched Guise technique‐ Subjects are Montreal Residences‐ Stimuli recorded by speakers who speak both languages (English, French) fluently
‐ The same paragraphs with two different “guises” (English and French)
‐ Subjects are asked to rank the different speakers on a number of different personality traits such as height, looks, intelligence, and likability.
‐ Result: Both English and French subjects rank the English `guises' higher on certain traits
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How people’s language ideology affects their perception of speech.
Linguistic Variation
• What is Linguistic Variation?‐ Study of the way language varies and changes in communities of speakers
‐ Concentrates in particular on the interaction of social factors (such as a speaker's gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc).
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- The methodology seeks to isolate variables at the levels of core features and to derive rules for their distribution, making correlations with social variables.
Linguistic Variation
• Morphosyntactic Variation‐ Negative concord (double negatives)e.g. I don’t need it any more./I don’t need it no more.
‐ Copular deletion (deletion of be‐verbs)e.g. This is my kid./This my kid. • Phonetic Variation‐ (IN/ING): playing/playin’‐ [can] /[cæn] for can
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AAVE speakers Copular deletion: defferent degrees depending on the grammatical status of subjects The difference of linguistic variation with discourse studies is that the unit of analysis in linguistic variation is the variables. What is a variable?
• What is a variable?: a set of alternative ways of saying the same thing, although the alternatives, or variants, have social significance.
eg. I’m going./ I’m goin’ (ING/IN).• A variable and variants
Variable (ING/IN)
Variants [iŋ] [in]
Sociolinguistic Variables
• Sociolinguistic (dependent) variables and independent variables
‐ A sociolinguistic variable co‐varies with a number of extra‐linguistic independent variables like social class, age, sex, ethnic group or style
‐ In analysis sociolinguistic variables are dependent variables while extra‐linguistic variables are independent variables.
Sociolinguistic Variables
The use of [in] variant of the variable (ing) in Norwich (Trudgill 1974)
Types of Variables
• Stable Variables‐ The variables that do not participate in sound change.
• Stable Variables in English1)Reduction of word‐final consonant clusters
eg. kept, most, fold (also known as (‐t/‐d) deletion)2) Alternation of velar and alveolar nasal in (ING/IN)
eg. running, ceiling, morning
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- For the stable variables there is often one variant that is overtly considered to be standard, while the other is considered to be non-standard. Thus there is usually a positive correlation between non-standard variants, lower social class, and casual style.
Types of Variables
• Change‐in‐progress Variables
‐ Variables that show the current sound change of a society
• Change‐in‐progress Variables in English
‐ Vowels: Northern City Shift, California Shift
Types of Variables
California Shift: change in progress
dance
? (can you guess?)
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Ae before nasals (n, m, ng) raised and dipthongized.
Recap
• What’s linguistics?– How do these subdisciplines differ? Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, semantics
• What’s the descriptive/prescriptive difference about?
• What is sociolinguistics? What sort of things get studied?
• What are the main sociolinguistic methods?• What’s a variable? Why do we care?
Next Time…
• Dichotomous Thinking vs. Social Construction
• Read:– Eckert & McConnell‐Ginet,
• Chapter 1, all• Chapter 2, 79‐90• Talbot (1992)
• Reminders:– Submit your first Ning Blog Post by Sunday, 12midnight
Appendix
Vowel production
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These might help:��http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#�http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html�http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/vowels.html
What about those passives?
• “The sandwich was eaten.”
• There’s nothing wrong with the passive– Sometimes it is harder to understand and produce passives than their active counterparts
– But the passive can be easier to read—as well as more artful—in a number of circumstances.
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Since the 1930s, there’s been a lot of blood and ink spilled to proscribe the passive construction (The sandwich was eaten.) Prescriptivist grammarians tell you never use it, or keep it under some arbitrary percentage like 2% or 20%, etc. There is nothing so wrong with the passive that it deserves the scorn it now receives. While it is true that passive constructions are generally harder to understand, learn, and produce than active counterparts, there are contexts when the passive does a better job than the active. The passive can be easier to read—as well as more artful—in a number of circumstances. When a series of facts come in succession, as in a dialogue or text, the language must be structured so that the listener can place each fact into an existing framework. Thus information about the old, the given, the understood, the topic, should go early in the sentence, usually as the subject, and information about the new, the focus, the comment, should go at the end. Putting the topic early in the sentence is another function of the maligned passive construction. Here’s the great example Pinker uses to show that the passive can work well. First a passage with only the active voice: Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists studying the nature of black holes in space. The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates a black hole. The second sentence feels like a non sequitur. It is much better to put it in the passive voice: Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists studying the nature of black holes in space. A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble. The second sentence now fits in smoothly, because its subject, a black hole, is the topic, and its predicate adds new information to that topic. (Pinker 228) Restrictions Sentences need to have the right topic—don’t wrestle a sentence into the active voice if the passive is more natural. But be on the look out for unnecessary (sloppy) passives. References For a quick history of the origin of the passive see: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003380.html. To see evidence that Churchill used the passive construction to great effect, see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.html. Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company. pp 227-228.
Information structure• When a series of facts come in succession, people need to be able to organize all the info.
• Information about the old, the given, the understood, the topic, should go early in the sentence, (usually as the subject), and information about the new, the focus, the comment, should go at the end.
• Putting the topic early in the sentence is another function of the maligned passive construction.
Presenter
Presentation Notes
When a series of facts come in succession, as in a dialogue or text, the language must be structured so that the listener can place each fact into an existing framework. Thus information about the old, the given, the understood, the topic, should go early in the sentence, usually as the subject, and information about the new, the focus, the comment, should go at the end. Putting the topic early in the sentence is another function of the maligned passive construction.
Oh, yes, it’s active
• Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists studying the nature of black holes in space. The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates a black hole.
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Pinker
But this is better
• Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists studying the nature of black holes in space. A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble.
• The second sentence now fits in smoothly, because its subject, a black hole, is the topic, and its predicate adds new information to that topic. (Pinker 228)
Education and Ebonics
How does language play a role in “the burden of acting White”? (Fordham and Ogbu)
Terrell and Terrell on speaking AAVE while trying to get a job
Oakland Ebonics controversy.
How do we address the achievement gap for students of color? What does language have to do with it?
Change in progress
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Presentation Notes
From Labov (1972: 161-162), if you're looking at language change in progress, you have to solve three problems: Transition: How do you find the route by which one stage of a linguistic change evolved from an earlier stage? Embedding: How do you find the continuous matrix of social and linguistic behavior in which the change is carried? Evaluation: How do you find the subjective (or latent) correlates of the objective (or manifest) changes that have been observed? You go for measuring attitudes/aspirations/reactions of consultants. Kroch (1978) is the perfect example of the socially minimalist approach: "the vernacular and corrective agency". There is some competence in the brain and it is asocial and it is just a linguistic system, perfectly regular and when you are speaking as automatically as possible, it's the vernacular and that is the most natural and represents the state of the language at that time. As you pay more attention, their consciousness and resistance sets in, ideology sets in. Everyone has a sense of "proper" and the more attention you pay, the more proper you are. Basically there is an idea that everyone is trying to be upwardly mobile and hide their social origins when they're conscious of their language use (Labov). Labov believes the most upwardly mobile class is the lower middle class and they are therefore where cross-over happens. There are natural processes in language, of course, which result in language change. How they proceed is a function of contact and a person's inclination to correct himself. So there is a hierarchy of control and resistance to control. Linguistic change spreads upward because it is natural, it's going to happen, it's inevitable, but it reaches greater resistance as it travels up. A lot of what we might talk about is what underlies that resistance.
