Housekeeping for today

1. Housekeeping for today • Presentation signups today • Pick one reading to sign up for • If there’s more than one in the box, circle the one you want • Your graded Blog 2 (LF exercises) will be returned Friday and Blog 3 due Monday 2/6 • Announcements & Class Lectures section updated on blog • Office Hours this week: Th 1:15-3:15 320 Allen • Thanks for the spontaneous posts; keep ‘em coming!

2. dialect development and the nature of linguistic variables Linguistics 187 / Cultural Anthropology 187 / English 187 / ICS 151C Variety in Language: English in the United States Duke University Erin Callahan-Price Spring 2012

3. Section I Prerequisite Concepts for Sociolinguistic Study: The Linguistic “Facts of Life” (some sections adapted from Pinker (1994))

4. First, a troubling news report… • This is Nancy O’Flagerty with KSNBC-Cincinnati News. • At a recent national conference of zookeepers, • scientists voiced concern that the natural beauty, • grace, and perfection of animal behavior was • in a state of decline worldwide. • Sharks denigrate the very minnows they eat with • increasingly lazy and less technically superior • hunting patterns. • Earthworms’ ‘slither patterns’ are in a • state of denigration: whereas their earthworm • ancestors could trace a straight, sludgy line from sidewalk to soil, today’s • generationjust don’t slither right! • Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. • White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their call. • Chickadee nests are incorrectly constructed. • Pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw. • The song of the humpback whale contains several well-known • errors, and monkey cries have been in a state of • denigration for years. • The Zookeepers Association hopes to issue a set of norms and standards. to representatives…

5. ‘Which is correct ?’ • To a linguist, language is like the song of that white-crowed sparrow: the only way to tell if it’s ‘grammatical’ or not is to find some other sparrows who speak some mutually intelligible dialect of Sparrowese-- and ask them. • The terms “rule” and “grammatical” have very different meanings for linguists and laypeople (including high school teachers and writers of the MLA handbook) • In fact, when nosy sociolinguists try to elicit data from guests at cocktail parties (how they say, for example, caught vs. cot) a common (frustrating) experience is to observe the informant’s wide-eyed “I don’t know… which is correct?”

6. Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Rules • The rules you learn in school are called prescriptive rules, and while they might be of interest to William Safire, they’re not in the domain of linguistics. • These rules (“don’t split infinitives,” “don’t begin a sentence with ‘And’”) are mostly about what people shouldn’t do. • Linguists formulate descriptive rules • These rules describe what people do do: in short, they describe the “behavior” of linguistic forms like phonemes and morphemes.

7. A few quotes on Prescriptivism:The word from the Academy • The linguistic questions laypeople care most about are questions of right and wrong, good and bad, ‘the use and abuse of language’…most everyday discourse on language is above all evaluativediscourse…This overriding concern with valueis the most significant characteristic that separates lay discourse on language from the expert discourse of linguists. • Linguists not only disapprove of the forms that popular interest in language take; they find the whole phenomenon somewhat bewildering– much as a chemist might be puzzled by laypeople forming an association devoted to the merits of the inert gases.” • -Cameron (1995, p. ix)

8. Language as a Window into the Mind • Linguists realize that most objects in the physical universe (rocks, atoms, DNA) can’t talk. (Pinker 1994) • Human speech, however, as a data source, is like hitting the empirical jackpot if you want to study stuff like • How the mind forms, organizes, and processes concepts • The demographics of global migrations and cultural contact • Contemporary racial stratification; critical theories of gender performance, institutional power dynamics, etc. etc.

9. Workable Blueprints • We linguists wanna “get under the hood” to see how this language thing works. What’s its programming? What rules does it follow in order to work? • If we build rules like “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition” or “Don’t use ain’t” the machine would just sit there. • Instead, we want to “reverse engineer” the linguistic system by postulating a deeper, fundamental set of descriptive rules. (Pinker 1994)

10. “Correct” English? “No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples the eat boy or The child seems sleeping or Who did you meet John and? or the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words. So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology…” (Pinker 1994, p.372)

11. Language and “Enlightenment” • Most of the snarkiest prescriptive rules in Standard English (don’t split infinitives, don’t end sentences with prepositions) derive from the 18th century Enlightenment language ideology. • For centuries, only the elite had access to a Latin education. • Latin had a monopoly on institutional prestige as the language of Western Christianity, writing, and bureaucracy. • In the midst of increased social mobility during the Englightenment, however, Latin began to be challenged by the ‘upstart’ London dialect of English. • Prescriptivist grammarians from ‘educated classes’ began to publish and distribute style manuals which attempted to apply the rules of Latin to English. (Pinker 1994, among others…)

12. Sample 18thC Style Manual -Robert Lowth (1710-1787) Bishop of the Church of England Oxford Professor of Poetry

13. First example: Negative Concord (Multiple Negation) • The linguistic structure that has (mostly derisively) been called “double negation” is a prime example of of Lippi Green’s Principle of Linguistic Subordination. Let’s unravel the linguistic strands before we start talking about the accompanying social process… • Lots of other dialects of English (as well as lots of non-English world languages) exploit the grammatical process of negative concord, which involves grammatical agreement. • Remember, “agreement” just means some particular linguistic feature (it can be syntactic, phonetic, morphological) encoding grammatical information appears multiple times in sentence.organization drawn from http://people.umass.edu/kpruitt/ling101.html accessed 2/6/2011

14. Crosslinguistic Negative ConcordExamples from Pruitt (2011) Familiar way of thinking about agreement:Number/gender agreement on Spanish articles nouns, and adjectives Sp. el libroazul = ‘the blue book’ loslibrosazules= ‘ the-pl./-masc. books-pl. blue-pl. Negative Concord in Fashionese: 1977 JC Penny’s Catalogue

15. Crosslinguistic Negative ConcordExamples from Pruitt (2011) Less familiar way of thinking about agreement: Agreement in negation Sp. Noquieronada not/NEG want-1sg. nothing/NEG ‘I don’t want anything’ Fr. Je neveuxrien I not/NEG want-1sg. nothing/NEG ‘I don’t want anything’ Negative Concord in Fashionese: 1977 JC Penny’s Catalogue

16. Crosslinguistic Negative ConcordExamples from Pruitt (2011) AAVE/SWVE He ain’t got no money. ‘He doesn’t have any money.’ AAVE Sometimes it didn’t have no chalk, no books, no teacher. ‘Sometimes there weren’t (/wasn’t) any chalk, any books, or any teacher.’ (from Green 2002) Negative Concord in Fashionese: 1977 JC Penny’s Catalogue

17. Negative Concord in the History of English Old English Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”

18. Language as Political Proxy • What does the Principle of Linguistic Subordination predict about our attitudes about the first two (Fr/Sp) vs. the last two (SWVE/AAVE) sentences? • “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (usually attributed to Weinreich (1945), p. 13 but might have originally come from Meillet) • Mutual Intelligibilitysometimes works, but consider these ‘different language’ pairs/triads: • Norwegian vs. Swedish • Serbo-Croation Serbian/Bosnian/Croation • Dutch vs. Afrikaans (Fasold 2009?)

19. Rickford puts it this way… • [V]ariationamong their • speakers is absolutely normal. Although we sometimes think or act as if there were one entity called American or British English--and grammatical handbooks help to reinforce this fiction--we know from actual experience that the "language" varies from one region to another, from one social group to another, and even (when region and social group are held constant), from one occasion or topic to another. “ • Rickford 2011 (p.2)

20. Constructing difference • Because of the Principle of Linguistic Subordination, we talk about ‘dialects’ when referring to linguistic systems that are as structurally different as the aforementioned “languages.” Cologne German (rural) Bavarian German Basilectal Welsh English Standard English BasilectalAAE

21. Discussion Questions for Friday • Please jot down some notes to bring to class on the following topics, based on your readings for today and Friday. I won’t take them up; it’s on your honor. : • What type of (social, economic, occupational, personal, gender-based, purpose-based, sexuality-based etc. etc.) judgments do we make when we hear someone talk, and why? • Are dialects “corrupted English”? Explain why or why not. • Why don’t/can’t people just speak Standard English? • Give examples of language ideology in action in the U.S. or worldwide. • How does language change (be specific)?

22. SKITS!

23. Scenarios for skits 1. Pick a partner 2. Together, brainstorm a scenario from either of your experiences with popular (“layperson”) language ideologies, e.g. a conversation with a friend, parent, etc. 3. One of you assume the role of aspiring “linguist” and one as the the layperson (“devil’s advocate”). Prepare to argue each point of view. 4. Use concepts/arguments/examples from Lippi Green and Wolfram (principle of linguistic inferiority) as well as prevalent popular language ideologies (Standard English) to stage a “Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist” spontaneous debate.

24. Section II Prescriptivism and the Principle of Linguistic Subordination (Lippi-Green 1997)

25. Discussion Questions • Please jot down some notes to bring to class on the following topics, based on your readings for today and Wednesday. I won’t take them up; it’s on your honor. : • What type of (social, economic, occupational, personal, gender-based, purpose-based, sexuality-based etc. etc.) judgments do we make when we hear someone talk, and why? • Are dialects “corrupted English”? Explain why or why not. • Why don’t/can’t people just speak Standard English? • Give examples of language ideology in action in the U.S. or worldwide. • How does language change (be specific)?

26. A few more quotes on Prescriptivism I would certainly think that students ought to know the standard literary languagewith all its conventions, its absurdities, its artificial conventions, and so on because that’s a real cultural system, and an important cultural system... Chomsky: from MIT Ling & Philosophy Dept. website I don’t think people should give them any illusions about what it is. It’s not better, or more sensible. Much of it is a violation of natural law... You don’t have to teach people their native language because it grows in their minds, So a good deal of what’s taught in the standard language is just a history of artificialities, and they have to be taught because they’re artificial. But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t know them. They should know them because they’re part of the cultural community in which they play a role…”

27. Key Theoretical Concepts: ‘The linguistic facts of life’ 1. All spoken languages change • …whether we like it or not. • “It is not conceivable that anyone would care to argue that Toni Morrison does not write or talk like Shakespeare that her in English is bad, less efficient, less capable of carrying out the functions which are needed.”(LG 1997) • Language standardization (grammars, spelling books, dictionaries, style manuals, etc.) attempts to “slow down” the pace of language change but are always unsuccessful. • Variation is intrinsic to all spoken language at every level • Lexical: sub vs. hoagie vs. grinder etc. in the U.S. • Phonological: distinction/merger of the /i/ and /I/, esp. before /l/ (field vs. filled) in Southern Englishes • Morphological: 0 possessive (John hat sittin on the table)in AAVE • Grammatical: perfective be (I’m been to the store) in Lumbee (N.C.) English, as well as past tense be regularization: The dogs was down there/I weren’t there) in Pamlico Sound • All spoken languages are equal in linguistic terms.

28. Wolfram & Schilling-Estes put it this way… …people several centuries in the future will look back on the English of this period as “archaic,” just as we look at the English of several centuries ago...Under constant linguistic pressure to change, some groups of speakers adopt certain changes while others hold out against them. If a new language feature continues to be used by a certain group but not by others, then a dialect difference is born. And if differing patterns of change by different groups of speakers go far enough, dialects may split into separate languages… WSE (44)

29. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. 2. All Spoken Languages are Equal in Linguistic Terms • The varieties we usually call “dialects” are not badly formed versions of Standard English. In fact, every language is a dialect. • Dialects are highly patterned, intricate, rule-governed and systematic varieties of a language. The rules are just different, just like the rules of English and Slovenian are different. • The “purpose” of dialects can be linked to the notions of covert and overt prestige (basketball court vs. job interview) Which one has more water? Which one has more dots?

30. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. 3. Grammaticality does not equal communicative effectiveness • Linguists use the term grammaticality to refer to the rule-driven structure of language: what sentences can be generated by a native speaker of English by age ~4… not ‘social grammaticality’ (next slide…) 1. Sam put a red scarf on the dog. 2. George took the dog 3. Linda asked what Sam put the red scarf on. 4. *George took the dog that Linda asked what Sam put a red scarf ‘Parser’ written in Prolog (programming language)

31. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. • G 3. Grammaticality does not equal communicative effectiveness (cont’d.) • Prescriptivists’ notions of grammar are socially (not linguistically) motivated. 1. I ain’t got none. 2. If you’re going out, I’m coming with. 3. Dad says the house needs painted (Michigan) • Dialects are highly patterned, intricate, rule-governed and systematic varieties of a language. The rules are just different, just like the rules of English and Slovenian are different. • The “purpose” of dialects can be linked to the notions of covert and overt prestige (basketball court vs. job interview)

32. In metaphorical terms (my favorite) “You can choose to break the laws of the state of Massachusetts but you can’t break the laws of physics” = ?

33. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. • Written language and spoken language are historically, structurally, and functionally different creatures • Most of the world’s languages are not written. Most of the world’s population is not literate. • Writing systems– even current ideographic systems (Chinese logographs)– are several orders away, in terms of abstractions, from human speech • Writing systems themselves have to be taught. • The conventions of written language have to be taught. • Some aspects of writing correspond with aspects of speech; others don’t.

34. Speech Writing • Taught • Struggles to capture paralinguistic information (!, #%&!, ;0) • Audience far away in space & time • Confusion/Ambiguity not • addressable • You provide the context • Permanent • Actively standardized • Acquired • Exploits paralinguistic information • Face to face with audience • A ‘back-and-forth conversational activity: confusion addressed immediately • The world provides the context • Ephemeral • Variable

35. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. • Written language and spoken language are historically, structurally, and functionally different creatures • Standardization (of written English, for example) emerged in tandem with economic issues generated by business practices related to printing en massevs. one-by-one (i.e. production by scribes) • The First Book Printed in English by Caxton’s press at Bruges: Recuyellof the Histories of Troy (~1473): translated from the French (Lefèvre, Le Recueil des histoires de Troyes)

36. Key Theoretical Concepts, cont. 5. Variation is intrinsic to spoken language at every level • Language Internal Pressures (‘a napron’ -> ‘an apron’, vowel shifts) • External Influences (Geographic Mobility, Social Behavior) (regional variation: ‘coke’ vs. ‘pop’, social variation: ‘he goes __’, ‘she’s all __’/’he’s like __’) • Variation arising from language as a Capsicum annuum: ‘Bell (sweet) peppers’ Pinguiculalongifolia Butterfly chrysalids, Costa Rica creative vehicle of free expression

37. American Dialect Society (ADS)Word of the Year • ADS has voted every year since 1990 on a “Word of the Year” • The criteria: — demonstrably new or newly popular in the year in question— widely and/or prominently used in the year in question— indicative or reflective of the popular discourse— not a peeve or a complaint about overuse or misuse • The word of the year for 2012 was… • Occupy: verb, noun, and combining form referring to the Occupy protest movement. • Narrowly beaten: FOMO acronym for “Fear of Missing Out,” describing anxiety over being inundated by information on social media. ->Previous winners…

38. THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIABLE Its linguistic significance, social context, and symbolic functioning or The fundamentals of covariation

39. The Sociolinguistic Variable: Definition & Ex. 1English English (t)(Britain n.d.) • So what is a sociolinguistic variable? • Any linguistic form which attaches to a social meaning. • Like… the glottal stop! (Britain n.d.)

40. Transcription: “The Football Factory” • "Bet you see some changes, eh, you two?" • "Yea." • "Bitdifferent nowadays though, isnɁ it, eh /Gun/? It's the Pakies comin’ over in the seventies, see? Takin’ over everything. /?/. And whaɁyou got now, right? Whatchagot now? Fucking asylum seekers! Bloody Tony fucking Blair. He'sgotta be a poofer and itain't new labor! I mean /an’/ this /game’s gone/. There was a time, righɁ , I used to be /out clear/ 700-800 shots a week doin' this. Not anymore. Nah." • "...Now what you goɁis your fucking /? solo/ on moonlighɁin'. MOONLIGHɁIN‘! Fuck sake, that's a joke. You need a full moon just to see 'em! This country was builɁ on good people like yerselves. Not enough of you about, that's whatI say."

41. The sociolinguistic variable: Example 2 Incidence of “High Rising Terminals” in New Zealand English by age and sex (Britain 1998; cited in Britain n.d.)

42. “An Apparent Uptick in Presidential Uptalk”Lieberman (2005) on Bush • Blogger— and UPenn Phonetics Prof. Mark Lieberman had this to say about uptalk(Lieberman 2005, blog post “Uptalk Uptick?”): • : “In his 12/12/2005 speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council…the president leads with 18 seconds of phrases with final rises: Thank you. Thanks for the warm welcome / Thank you for the chance to come and speak to the – Philadelphia World Affairs Council. / This is an important organization that has uh since 1949, has provided a [@C] forum for debate / and discussion on important issues. / To be more precise, his phrase-final pitch contours range form slightly falling, to level, to sharply rising. All are within the range of what would be called ‘uptalk’ if produced by a young woman from the San Fernando Valley— though in fact this pattern has always been widely distributed among American regions, classes, and sexes.”

43. Bush’s uptalk: “phrase-final pitch contours range from slightly falling, to level, to sharply rising.” -from Lieberman (2005) on Language Log

44. The sociolinguistic variable: Example 3 Incidence of 0 3rdsg. marking” in Norwich English by social class (Trudgill 1998; cited in Britain n.d.) • This graph shows the correlation of the absence of third person present tense marking (e.g. 'she play', 'the boy sing') with social class membership in the city of Norwich in England (from Trudgill 1974). • Trudgill found that the 'higher' the social class of the speaker, the lower the absence of -s marking. % absence of 3rd person marking SOCIAL CLASS

45. The sociolinguistic variable: Example 4 Incidence of non-standard [n] of variant (ing)* in Norwich by social class (Trudgill 1998; cited in Britain n.d.) *(ing)= playin’ vs. playing Sometimes called ‘velar fronting’

46. Symbolic Significance of Linguistic Variantsovert vs. covert prestige • So why does 0-marking (as in ‘She play’/’The boy sing’) even show up in the first place (if it’s socially stigmatized)? What does it “get” the speaker? • Trudgill (1974) hypothesized that the social factors of overtvs. covert prestige were at play in 0-marking variation. • Overt prestige: sociolinguistic ‘capital’ (Bourdieu 1991) associated with the prestigious and/or standard form of a local dialect • ….in Norwich, social indices like gained through associating oneself with prestigious (RP) Standard English English like ‘educated,’ ‘middle/upper class,’ ‘upwardly mobile’ • Covert prestige: sociolinguistic ‘capital’ associated with the subordinate and/or vernacular form of a local dialect • …in Norwich, social indices gained from in-group identification like ‘toughness,’ ‘masculinity,’ (Bourdieu: ‘virility’) ‘in-group solidarity,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘honesty’

47. Assignment and Instantiation of Sociolinguistic Significance • Within vernacular dialect communities, what social mechanisms assign social meaning to particular forms? How does a dialect establish sociolinguistic norms? • Within a speech communities, all varieties get “normed” (just as Standard English is normed by dictionaries, the MLA, etc.); this is just the establishing of ‘controls’ on the market, which in turn influence and (are influenced by/anticipated by) linguistic habitus (Bourdieu 1991)

48. Indicators, Markers, Stereotypes • In part, we can trace the assignment of significance by recognizing three types of sociolinguistic “markers”: 1. social indicators: no conscious recognition of social significance 2. social markers: conscious recognition; no overt comment 3. stereotypes: conscious recognition with overt commentary

49. Variable 5Another oldie by goodie…/r/ in NYC: Labov (1966) • Labov wanted to test his theory with a bigger population than Martha’s Vineyard. • Incidence of final and post-vocalic /r/ • While most American accents are rhotic, New York (and Boston) have distinctive non-rhotic accent • Post-Depression, such urban accents lost prestige, and rhoticmidwest accent emerged as standard • Labov showed that rhotic use of /r/ reflected social class and aspiration, and was more widespread in younger speakers (i.e. in NYC) Next Slides fadapted rom Somers, Harold “W. Labov’ssociolinguistics”

50. Method • Not practical to interview speakers extensively, as on Martha’s Vineyard • Instead, needed to quickly elicit possible /r/ pronunciations in both spontaneous and careful speech • Walked around 3 NYC department stores, asking the location of departments he knew were on the fourth floor • By pretending not to hear, he got each informant to pronounce the two words twice, once spontaneously, and once carefully • 3 stores catering for distinct social groups: • Saks (upper), Macy’s (middle), S. Klein (lower) Slides from Somers, Harold “W. Labov’ssociolinguistics