Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics December 23, 1998 Sociolinguistics: studying language in society OVERVIEW: 1. Language variation 2. Standard language 3. Social factors 4. Language variation and linguistic research ============================================================= 1. Language variation >Language is not just grammar in individual brains, but it is a social tool that changes society and is changed by society. >Speech community: a social group of people who share a language (includes a country, a town, a network across great distances) >Grammars can vary a lot across speech communities: >Regional variation: dialects >Social variation: sociolects >Variation within a single speaker: registers >Regional dialects >Regional dialects in the US (OVERHEAD) >Phonological differences >r-less dialects: Some dialects in the US delete /r/ after a vowel: Wisconsin Maine N. Carolina "car" [khar] [kha:] [kha:] "farm" [farm] [fa:m] [fa:m] "red" [rEd] [rEd] [rEd] >Lexical differences >Words for 汽水: Wisconsin Maine N. Carolina "soda" "pop" "coke" >Syntactic differences >the: USA Canada at school at school at the hospital at hospital >anymore: Wisconsin Ohio I don't like you I don't like you anymore. anymore. *I hate you I hate you anymore. anymore. *I like you *I like you anymore. anymore. >Taiwan Mandarin vs. Beijing Mandarin: >Phonological differences >Deretroflexivization: Beijing Taiwan 是 [SI51] [sI51] >Loss of the distinction between [N] and [n]: >Lexical differences >Morphology: Reduced use of 兒 suffix: >Lexicon: Different words: English Beijing Taiwan "potato" 土豆 馬鈴薯 "guava" 番石榴 ？ 芭樂 >Syntactic differences Beijing Taiwan (nonstandard) 我打他。 他給我打。 >Sociolect: a language variety spoken by a group that share social features such as occupation, age, class, race, etc. >Occupation: People sometimes use special vocabularies (jargon) for their job: "normal" word Biologists Linguists voicebox larynx larynx grammar -- syntax -- -- grammar -- -- morphology -- morphology -- >Education: Literate people (who can read and write) often speak quite differently from nonliterate people; for example, they use more passive sentences. >Age: Older people speak the language the way many people spoke it long ago; their speech is thus a record of the never-ending change of language. >Gender: Women and men often speak differently; more below. >Variation within a single speaker >Register: a speech variety (style) that is appropriate for different situations (e.g. formal vs. casual). >Different registers may be thought of as different grammars within a single person's person's brain. >Formal English: "The elderly gentleman passed away. We shall all miss him terribly. Had it not been for his assistance, our goals would never have been achieved. He was truly marvelous." >Casual English: "The old man died. We'll miss him a lot. If he hadn't helped us, we'd never've reached our goals. He was really cool." >Code-switching: switching between registers, or even dialects or languages, within a conversation. >Poplack (1980): code-switching by a Spanish speaker in Los Angeles: "But I used to eat the BOFE, the brain. And then they stopped selling it because TENIAN, ESTE, LE ENCONTRARON QUE TENIA worms. I used to make some BOFE! DESPUES YO HACIA UNO D'ESOS concoctions: the garlic CON CEBOLLA, Y HACIA UN MOJO, Y YO DEJABA QUE SE CURARA ESO for a couple of hours...." >When variation happens within one grammar, you need to describe this with variable rules: >Variable t/d-deletion in English: exact book -> exac' book [OFTEN] exact reason -> exac' reason [LESS OFTEN] exact answer -> exac' answer [RARE] >The [N]/[n] pattern in Taiwan Mandarin is also variable, and is sensitive to phonetic context. >Summary of language variation (OVERHEAD) 2. Standard language >Prescriptivism: the belief that linguistic rules are like government laws that tell people how they should speak, rather than like scientific laws that describe how people actually speak. >Standard language: the variety of a language that is considered to be the standard because it's used by the government and the media, is taught in schools, and/or is the only written language. >Other varieties are thus often considered "bad": >Anti-"Australian" prejudice in Taiwan (OVERHEAD) >Standard Chinese??? 國語 = 普通話 ??? >Banned languages and dialects: officially disallowed in some context (e.g. school or in government documents). >In the USA: American Indian languages, Spanish, African-American Vernacular English (Black English) >In Taiwan: Taiwanese, native Austronesian languages (Tsou, Amis, ...) >Sometimes speaking a non-standard language is an advantage, though, if people believe that the standard was unfairly imposed from above: [NEWSPAPER CLIPPING] 3. Social factors >This leads us to our main point this week: how social factors and linguistic factors interact. >In terms of cognitive psychology, you can say that language processing must involve two kinds of information at one time: grammatical information (phonology, syntax, etc) and social information (about the listener, the social situation, etc). >This social information is extremely complex: >Rules for naming people in American English (OVERHEAD) >Different words for "you" in Mandarin (highly simplified!) Speaker Listener Word friend/family friend/family 你 adult stranger 您 student teacher 老師 >Such social factors are so powerful, that speakers come to believe that words alone have "magic" powers. [CARTOON OVERHEAD] >Taboo language: words and phrases that are not supposed to be used in "polite society" >"The seven words you cannot say on television." (George Carlin) >Euphemism: A polite way of avoiding a taboo word or for making an unpleasant concept "sound nicer" Neutral word Taboo word Euphemism feces shit Number 2 die croak pass away >Taboo avoidance has led to some surprising changes in the history of languages: >The ancestor language of English used a word like ursus for "bear". Why did it change? Because those ancient people worshipped bears as gods, and so it was a taboo to call them directly by name. Instead, they were named with the euphemism "the Brown Ones": "bear" comes from the old word for "brown". >The common word for "chopstick" in Mandarin used to be 箸. But this word sounds like 駐, which may give you bad luck by "stopping" your business or your life. Thus the word 筷 was invented because it sounds like 快, the opposite of 駐. (If you don't believe me, look it up yourself!) >But of course taboos and euphemisms "make no sense": shit is shit, whether you call it "shit" or "feces"! Yet people feel that words alone (i.e. their sounds alone) somehow have power independent of their meaning! Very strange.... >Even the names of languages are controversial: >Is "Chinese" one language or many? [OVERHEAD] >Is the standard language in China "Chinese" or "Mandarin" or "Putonghua" or "Guoyu"? >Do people in Taiwan speak "Taiwanese" or "Hokkien" or "Fukiennese" or "Southern Min? >Similar controversies exist everywhere in the world! >Race can influence people's perception of language; e.g. if you look "foreign" in the US, people will imagine you have an accent. >Probably the most complicated social factor affecting language is gender (female vs. male). >Women and men often have slightly different "grammars" at many different levels: >Lexicon: Women often know and use a greater number of words for colors (e.g. maroon, mauve, ...) >Morphology: Japanese women use the o- prefix much more often than men (e.g. "Atashi, o-mizu nonde kuru" [I'll go drink o-water and come back]) >Syntax: English-speaking women tend to use more tag questions: "I don't like linguistics, do you?" Chinese-speaking women use the sentence- final particle 耶 more than men. >Phonology: In Koasati (spoken in Louisiana), men and women even have different phonological rules! Women Men English lakaw lakaws "he is lifting it" lakawwilit lakawwilitS "I lifted it" >Phonetics: Male and female speakers of many languages speak with a lower/higher pitch than they "have to": that is, they exaggerate the pitch difference to sound more different from the opposite sex. >Sexist language: because men control public life in most cultures, men often control the standard language, which then becomes biased towards men. >Many languages treat MALE as the unmarked situation. That is, "normal" people are men, so women are something different and unusual (marked). >Sexist lexicon (words that imply men are unmarked): >"mankind" = "humanity" >"chairman" = "chair" >Sexist syntax (pronouns): >Prescriptivists say that the English generic ("general") pronoun must be masculine: (1) Everyone1 should love his1 mother. (2) Everyone1 should love her1 mother. >However, this "rule" is very often broken: (3) Everyone1 should love their1 mother. >Sexist syntax (word order) (phrases that put females last): (4) Boys and girls are equal. (5) Girls and boys are equal. >Sexist morphology (again, implies that women are marked): >actor [male] + ess -> actress [female] >Why no suffixes to create men from women? ("nurse-man" or something?) >Sexist orthography (writing)? (6) 他是我的朋友，她也是。 (7) 他們都是我的朋友。 好、奴、奸、妖、妙、安、始、姓、姚、娓、娛、姘 4. Language variation and linguistic research >Language variation can tell us a lot about two important questions: >How do languages change? (see next week!) >Is part of grammar innate (天生的)? >If so, then why don't children just make up their own language? >Ah, but they do! Sometimes, adults will invent a crude, clumsy fake language called a pidgin: a helping language invented when adult speakers of different languages must communicate. >Pidgins have very little grammar: it's like "tourist" language, e.g. "Me go airport. You know airport? Many planes, zoom-zoom!" >The children of these adults take this linguistic mess and turn it into a full language, with a complete grammar: a creole. >Does this mean that children's brains "invent" grammar from very little experience? If so, then part of grammar must be innate!