Stylistic variation: variation in the speech of individual
speakers
Last week
- variation
in language at the regional level, e.g. in ‘Outer Circle’ countries
- use
of indigenous languages, e.g. for living in
- use
of English, e.g. as an official language
- retention
of colonial language not inevitable even in very multilingual countries
- Cameroon
and Tanzania have similar linguistic diversity
- Tanzania
uses Swahili
- Cameroon
uses French and English
- in
such ‘Outer Circle’ countries, there are competing motives for choosing
languages
- vernacular:
identity
- English:
internationalism
This week
- more
focus on individual motives
- not
at code-switching
- switching
between languages
- why
code instead of language? (communicative function
emphasized)
- but
at style-shifting
- between
different varieties of “the same language”
Class tonight corresponds to only a few sections from
Crystal (407, 410, 416, 422)
- in/formality
in letter-writing
- variety
freedom/humour (prestige, regional varieties)
- literary
freedom
Building from
- individual
variation in speech
- literary
examples: two poems which represent Guyanese Creole
Q: In what contexts are you aware of varying your
language?
- occupation:
e.g. lawyer, priest, literary critic
- in/formality:
e.g. academic essay vs letter, email
- region
settings: e.g. going home to Nova Scotia (or phoning)
- ‘ethnic’
settings: e.g. talking at home in Woodbridge vs at school
- interesting
case: white teens’ use of African-American Vernacular English to indicate
affiliation with ‘cool’ youth culture
Q: Variation often depends on social norms rather than
individual choice. Ex?
- academic
essay written in formal English
Q: What linguistic features are you aware of varying when you use
- occupational
register
- more
formal language
- Latinate
lexis
- more
correct grammar
- fewer
contractions
People’s language can also vary in correlation with other
variables, e.g. age, sex, socioeconomic status
·
we’re often less aware
of that
People are more aware of some variants than others
- many
Canadians not aware that about is distinctive until they go south
- noticed
by non-Canadians – less a marker within Canada
Examples from Canada of age-linked variation
- Jack
Chambers’ findings about the distribution of particular variables
- mention
terms like variable and variant
- variable:
past tense of DIVE
- variants:
dove, dived
- conclusions
from age variation
- change
in progress
- cheaper
than doing study at 10 year intervals!
- necessary
assumption: that language doesn’t change during lifetime
Examples from elsewhere of salient variants
- more
stereotypical/marked features within other regional varieties, e.g.
absence of /r/ in coastal US, e.g. Boston, NY
- review
Q: how might you explain non-rhotic pronunciation in coastal US?
In the 1960s, a pioneering sociolinguist was curious about
postvocalic /r/ in NY English (park, car)
- non-rhotic
was the stereotype: New Yoik
- but
there was variation:
- his
hypothesis was that /r/ was becoming more common in the stereotypical New
Yoik accent
- hypothesis
was that it should correlate with socioeconomic status
Method: somehow correlate frequency of /r/ with different factors
- social
factors: socioeconomic status, age, sex
- hypothesis:
higher status speakers would use /r/ more
- since
he assumes /r/ prestige variant
- also
wanted to look at attention to speech, formality
- hypothesis:
/r/ would correlate with attention to speech
- since
assumed to be prestige variant
Age, sex are easy to determine! But how do you determine somebody’s
socioeconomic status efficiently?
- Labov’s
solution: the department stores they frequent
- H:
Saks
- M:
Macy’s
- L:
Klein’s
How do you elicit casual / careful speech?
- careful
- repetition:
asked a Q that would elicit the answer “fourth floor”, and pretended not
to hear it
- reading:
minimal pairs like cad and card, passage of prose,
answering an interviewer’s questions
- casual
speech
- cunning:
pretended interview over and then asked about life & death situation
in dangerous city
After the study, Labov made general conclusions about socioeconomic
status and language
- /r/
directly correlated with higher socioeconomic status
- confirmed
his hypothesis that /r/ was prestige variant
- but
complicated: middle-class people used /r/ more than he expected
- more
older people at Macy’s (middle) than he expected used /r/
- assumed
that during their lifetimes, they’d adopted /r/
- when
lower m/c women could pay attention to their language, they used more
/r/s than the upper m/c average
- both
findings show: people of intermediate social status seemed more
likely to have social aspirations that would lead them to change their
accent (permanently or temporarily) in the direction of the perceived
‘prestige’ accent
Labov’s general observations about attention and
language
- more
formal language tends to correlate with /r/
- complication:
Problems with assuming that all speakers always aim at prestige varieties
- Trudgill:
l/c male solidarity
Problems w/ preimposed social categories
Later sociolinguistic methods have included looking at
- the
real dynamics of real groups
- tightly-knit
groups, e.g. w/c men
- ‘vernacular
norms’ often prevail
- more
loosely-knit groups, e.g. w/c Catholic women in Belfast who work in m/c
Protestant area as well as hanging out w/ their men
- agents
of change? bring home Protestant m/c vowels?
- using
locally-salient ways of categorizing people
- issue
in Belfast English: does language vary with ethnicity?
Different settings have different kinds of linguistic variation
- supraregional
prestige dialects
- regional
dialects
- more
salient in Britain than Canada
- Q:
why are there fewer dialects in settler Englishes?
Style-shifting is more pronounced in cultures where a
regional variety of English has developed and coexists with standard English
- regional
varieties exemplified in last week’s literary texts
- literary
representations of
- Indian
English
- English-based
Creole from Guyana
There are terms to describe variation between regional variety and the
‘standard’
- term
for variety closer to standard: acrolect
- term
for more regional/most different from the standard: basilect
- interference
from local languages
- interference
from learning process
- what’s
between: continuum
Ability/flexibility to shift dependent upon level of education
- use
of basilect used to be seen as deficit – inability to command
standard
- ability
to switch really a social skill
- Dabydeen:
born in Guyana, studied English at Cambridge, teaches literature in
England
Style-shifting along the continuum can reflect
- social
norms:
- e.g.
standard English at school, for literary criticism
- e.g.
vernacular at home, for literature
- individual
choice
Individual variation can also reflect combination of other factors
- “audience
design”: speaker’s language variation reflects their awareness of audience
- ex.
sociolinguistic studies have to be careful about who does the interviewing
- people
speak differently to an interviewer from a peer group than to an
interviewer they don’t know
- 1876
German dialectologists: sent questionnaires about regional use to local
schoolteachers
- 1896
French dialectologist: hired a grocer with a good ear to cycle around
France on a bicycle
- Q:
can you think of instances where you know you vary your language because
of who you’re speaking to (or to whom you’re speaking?!)
- “speaker
design”: speaker’s language variation reflects their construction / display
of their identity
- ex.
combination: salespeople adopting more vernacular language to bond with a
client
- group
affiliations: gangs, cliques
- 2000
study of high schools in Detroit: school-oriented “jocks” vs
urban-oriented “burn-outs”
- 1993
study of California adolescent called “Trendy” and her peer group
Literary text from last week, Dabydeen’s “Slave Song”
- text
in basilect
- projects
speaker’s identity
- though
whose perspective is “Happy as a Hottentot”
- emphasizes
linguistic and social difference between speaker, addressee
- a
difference hypothetically articulated by addressee: “Tell me how me
hanimal”
- speaker
aware that addressee thinks he’s different/lower
- while
asserting his desire to “totempole”, “tattoo” his master’s wife
- make
them more like him?
- assert
their common humanity despite hierarchy of slavery?
What might be said about Dabydeen’s display of his roles
as poet, translator, critic in “Slave Song”?
- breaks
down dualities
- i.e.
writer or critic, practitioner/theorist, standard or Creole, literate or
illiterate, centre or margin
- complexity
of identity
- foregrounds
his ability to distance as well as accommodate English audience?
Some implications of speaker design model
- language
use doesn’t passively reflect your place in existing social structures
- language
use helps shape those social structures
- speech
can erase or create social boundaries
Not simple
- if
people’s speech converges with audience, it isn’t always with benevolent
intent
- imitation
as mockery
- or
necessity = perhaps one reason why “World” writers write in English
- speaker
can diverge from audience
- last
year somebody suggested: to try to change their speech
- to
emphasize social gulf, speaker’s confidence in identity
Agard, “Listen Mr Oxford Don” a good example of style
shifting for divergence
- careful
reading of the poem shows that the speaker could speak in standard English
but chooses not to
- audience:
constructed as an “Oxford Don”
- speaker:
constructs himself as not one
- three
non-standard features in first line alone, “Me not no Oxford don”
- me
in subject position
- null
copula
- cumulative
negation
Rhyme scheme
shows non-standard prosody
- syllable
timing rather than stress timing: every syllable takes up about the same
amount of time
- 1,3:
common rhymes with don
- 29,
32: don rhymes with weapon
[stress timing: the constant amount of time (on average) is between two consecutive stressed
syllables: e.g. “two consecutive stressed syllables.”]
Graphological deviance emphasizes other non-standard
pronunciation
- /ε/
for /e/ - vowel laxing
- 10:
ent “ain’t” (non-standard too)
- 27:
tekking for taking
- 33:
mek for make
- no
interdental fricative – they’re rare cross-linguistically
- 7,12:
de for the
- 22:
dem for them
- 30:
wit for with
- I
only armed wit mih human breath
Speaker design
- showing
that he CAN command the standard forms if he wants to
- 29:
I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don
- subject
is I; there’s a copula verb, there’s no double negative
- I
used everywhere except first lines
- 4-5:
graduate and immigrate have the /e/ sound
- he
pronounces the “simple” words Creole but the Latinate ones standard
- demonstrating
that he chooses not to converge with the Oxford don, rejecting standard
English and all it stands for
Even the use of standard English can be strategic
David Dabydeen’s poem sequence Turner
- named
after the painter, known for seascapes and landscapes, water and light
- one
painting “Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying” (1840) admired
by critic Ruskin for its representation of “the noblest sea that Turner
ever painted”
- shackled,
drowning Africans just aesthetic
- Dabydeen
made “Turner” the captain of the slave ship in his poem
- felt
that “the intensity of Turner’s painting is such that I believe the
artist in private must have savoured the sadism he so publicly denounced.
I make Turner the captain of the slave ship.”
Sonnet XXIV is the penultimate poem
- Turner’s
just raped the narrator’s sisters
- that’s
why it’s “Turner crammed our boys’ mouths too with riches”
- first
person plural:
- solidarity?
- loss
of individual identity? just slaves…
- speaker
uses standard English – ditto?
- figures
the imposition of whites’ language into black mouths as a series of
figurative penetrations
- forced
homosexual oral sex
- potentially
emasculating
- not
generative
- maternal
nursing
- generative:
creating something new rather than destroying
- whites
rationalize treatment of “inferior races” not just as as rescuing and
civilizing
- fishhook
- not
just a temporary penetration like the others: permanently wounding
- blacks
can no longer represent themselves in any other way than in white art
with white language
Dabydeen’s Turner
- standard
English can be used to attack Englishness
- English
language no longer the property of the English
Some other sources:
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. “Investigating stylistic
variation.” The handbook of language variation and change. Ed. J.K.
Chambers et al. Blackwell, 2002.
Wright, Susan. “Accents of English.” English: history,
diversity, change. Ed. David Graddol et al. Routledge, 1996