Sociolinguistics Three

1.    Cut to the chase

I’m going to skip over most of this, merely pausing to provide a link to the Wikipedia article on keigo, before getting into the real business of the final discussion task. I might also include a brief diversion here to note that I recognize the slight clash of mode and field I’ve got going on here, where I’m quite deliberately discussing academic matters in a style and medium more usually associated with more casual discourse. Whether you consider that to be successful or not is largely up to you.

Lexis Six

Right. This all strikes me as very important and useful. I have, however, yet to work out exactly how. Bear with me.

1.    On the Ground and In the Air

“…there is room for work here too on going beyond simply statistical accounts of collocation, and trying to explain why words co-occur.”

No shit. Not ‘room’ so much vast open prairies stretching to the horizon and beyond so your view of open space is only limited by the curvature of the earth, for work.

Lazy Re-run

Here are some thoughts on the philosophical differences between the physical and social sciences, because they may be of interest and they should at least help to clarify where I’m coming from.

I have a BSc in (Physical) Geography. It’s not exactly particle physics, but I spent my own fair share of time in the lab with the safety goggles on and it did give me a reasonable grounding in ‘the scientific method’. The essay below I submitted as part of my subsequent MA (in Environmental Politics, if you care), so there are probably a few copyright issues with pasting it up here. However, when I was digging it out I was slightly disappointed to find that it’s been almost a decade since I wrote it, so we should be fine. I’ve also long since lost the references file so anyone looking to rip if off for an essay mill will have to do at least some sort of work to get it up to standard. I also can’t remember the exact question it was meant to answer.

Anyway, here you go:

  

Evolution of a Language

I gave that academic a conceptual diagram. Academics love conceptual diagrams.

  

Clear as mud

  

‘Evolution’ is a tricky metaphor for language development. I’m still trying to work out if it’s suitable or not, though I suspect it’ll be superficially attractive but ultimately not really workable. Comparing methods of evolutionary speciation to language development might be pretty instructive, but one of the main underpinnings of biological taxonomy is that cross-breeding between species is impossible; that’s a pretty good description of what a species is. That obviously doesn’t hold true for languages (and it’s worth noting there are dissenting voices on the biological front as well).

Sociolinguistics Two

1. Redundancy

“… pidgin Englishes are characterised by a limited vocabulary and the elimination of many grammatical devices such as reduction of redundant features.”

(emphasis added)

Here we go. “Redundant features” eh? I’m finally getting round to properly reading up on Information Theory and it’s interesting the way Shannon distinguishes between signal and noise, or efficiency and redundancy, and carrying capacity..

Morse’s original code had a different sequence of dots and dashes relating not to letters but to words in a dictionary. This was obviously very efficient in terms of information transmission and carrying capacity, but not particularly flexible. There was also little redundancy, which increased the room for error. If you get the sequence I-A-M-H-A-P-P-D you can be fairly sure that the D is an error and should be Y. But if you get I-AM-SAD then there’s no way of even intuiting if SAD is an error or not. In Shannon’s conception the more predicable the next step in a sequence is the less information it is said to be conveying, so the D, if intentional, has more informational value than the Y. It’s the same principal as with dropping the vowels in tlgrms or txts.

You increase efficiency by decreasing redundancy, but nothing’s truly redundant. ‘Redundancies’ act as checks, decreasing the impact of inevitable errors in transmission, which would explain why they get reintroduced as pidgins develop into full-blown languages, even at the loss of efficiency.

Lexis Five

1.    I’mfinethankyouandyou?

Ah, here we go. Now we really get to the meat of it.

I don’t think Japanese (the language or people) is/are necessarily any more formal than English (the language or people). There does seem though to be a greater willingness to acknowledge and codify the formalities, and thus introduce more explicit ‘rules’ governing behaviour and communication that we might be expected to understand more implicitly in the UK. Maybe.

Lexis Four

A bit more hands on, this one. If a largely theoretical exercise can be ‘hands on’. You know what I mean.

Either way, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to slightly sarcastic extemporizing in the usual way, so this’ll be short. Just a couple of quick points.

Sociolinguistics One

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

An old saw, but a pleasingly robust one. The requirement for a navy, for example, helps explain why Switzerland has no single language of its own and has to make do with borrowings from more seafaring nations.

Lexis Three

1.    ¡Hasta el infinito, y más allá! 

In Japan the traffic lights are ‘blue’ despite there being a separate word for ‘green’, and the sun is red not yellow. It’s right there on the flag.

So those “perceivable differences.” The question is, ‘perceived by who(m)?’ I’m sure we’ve all had discussions of various levels of heatedness with friends, sales clerks, and shopping buddies over whether a particular item of clothing is black or just very very dark blue. How much are those perceptions cultural (the red sun in Japan), linguistic (yellow most everywhere else), or individual (Newton, of course, spoke of ‘white’ light)? How do they feed up and down? If a word holds a meaning simply because a critical mass of people thinks that it does, then whose ‘perception’ really matters?

Lexis Two

1.    Where Wings Take Dream

Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? I’ll dig it out and put some thoughts up soon.

* * * * *

              “Search your memory for a few such mistakes… How do you explain these occurrences?”

Alcohol.