End of ADS-L Digest - 23 Dec 1993 to 24 Dec 1993

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There are 4 messages totalling 114 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. modren metathesis (4)



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Date:  Sat, 25 Dec 1993 00:29:18 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike <RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET>

Subject: Re: modren metathesis



To: Gwyn Williams



From: Rudy Troike



Subject: "Mixed-up Primitives"



    It is sadly true that "linguistic scientists", who of all people should

be sensitive to the significance of language, have probably been more cavalier

than almost any other group of specialists in taking words with well-

established popular meanings and giving them technical meanings and then trying

to convince the rest of the world that they should put aside the original

meaning and embrace the new technical sense. It is not true that no one has

ever tried to change this: in the 1970's, people like Raven McDavid were trying

very hard to erase the unfortunate legacy of technical use of the term

<dialect>, and replace it with <variety>, allowing one to speak simply and

non-pejoratively of "regional variation" and "social variation". Unfortunately

this effort seems to have regressed in recent years.

    However, while it is hard, as anyone involved with language policy

knows full well, to change established usages, it should be easy to avoid the

mistakes of the past with new coinages. The handful of scholars using "mixing"

for intra-sentential code-switching have not gone so far down the road that

their neologism is irrevocable. To argue in favor of using the term is on a

par with reinstating the term "primitive" in discussions of language, usually

in contexts which placed European languages at the top of the value-heap.

    Since code-switching of whatever kind occurs in the process of speaking

or writing or signing, it is inherently a phenomenom observed in performance,

though receptive competence can be tested to some extent experimentally, with

the usual caveats. [The misspelling above being a performance error, since I

am a terrible typist.] Intra-sentential CS is to some extent psycholinguistic-

ally a different critter from Inter-sentential CS, since the latter requires

much less facility in both languages. Don Lance's Spanish is much better than

mine (he used to teach it); he can do intra-sentential CS and I can't. It

seems to be true with some populations that switching within sentences is very

rare, but generally the more fluent the speaker in both languages, the more

likely switching will occur within sentences. However, even for such groups,

the tendency is very great for switching to occur at sentence boundaries.

    If exo-sentential switching seems rare in Thai/English, it would be

valuable if you would conduct a study and publish the results. Since there

are a few studies on Chinese/English switching, the results could be compared.

[Irrelevantly here, but I knew a Thai speaker in the US who refused to speak

Thai with another native speaker who was older than she was but whom she did

not like, since she did not want to have to linguistically acknowledge

deference to her.] Given the hierarchic nature of Thai society, the relation

of CS to social relations would be interesting as well as the purely syntactic

constraints.

    One would hope that several decades of international polemic over

center/periphery, colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the like would have sensitized

almost everyone to the underlying issues involved, but people immersed in the

center often do not recognize the issues, and academicians are often too

involved in their own work to have heard of the debates. The civil rights

movement in the U.S. did, I believe, sensitize many social scientists to

conditions and consequences of (internal) colonialism more than is the case

in many other countries. To call this heightened awareness a "hangup" is

simply to trivialize it and dismiss it. Those of us who have ridden the crest

of ESL teaching have participated in the colonialist process, usually without

being aware of it. I would hope that the kind of sensitivity that anthropolo-

gists have been trying to get other social scientists to adopt internationally

would apply here.