National Grammar Day!

In case you were dreadfully unaware, this Tuesday is National Grammar Day. Here is an interesting rebuttal to the whole concept. Hooray for descriptivists!

Misc Updates

I've finally put up two papers from my days at Teachers College, both from a course I took in Interactional Sociolinguistics this past fall.

I'm also in the process of reconsidering the design of my website. I'm actually considering adding some color (gasp!), though something stubborn inside me wants me to stay true to the simple black and white. Any comments and suggestions on that one much appreciated.

Finally, I've got quite a backlog of arty tidbits to report on, hopefully by the end of the week.

Transfer to Nowhere

In Second Language Acquisition (SLA) there are two types of transference: linguistic and cognitive. Linguistic means you can see the influence of the native language on the second language in the surface of the structure-- grammatical errors, etc. This is part of the "Transfer to Somewhere" hypothesis, that you can see the influence. "Transfer to Nowhere" is more interesting in that it is cognitive and you can't readily see the influence. That is, one could have a perfectly grammatical sentence but it still sounds "off" because a native speaker would most likely never produce a sentence that way-- that your native language shapes how you express your experience of the world. So off isn't necessarily off or odd, I think it could also be refreshingly different. It makes me think about writers working in their second/third/fourth/etc. languages. Did Nabokov transfer Russian onto French onto English? I guess he (and Conrad) might be exceptions because they were so able to manipulate English (and I'm guessing their other languages). But then again, I don't think the influence necessarily causes language to sound off (though in many cases it might, and it does get mixed in with the grammar issues), at least in the cases of talented language users/manipulators.

Interactional Sociolinguistics

I'm taking a course in Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS). It looks at how culture and society is replicated and created in social interaction, a microanalysis that has larger implications. One big area of research that I'm particularly interested in is how IS can elucidate intercultural/interethnic misunderstandings. A lot of work has been done on "gatekeeping." A study that's been mentioned in a lot of the introductory readings relates the story of a South Asian man interviewing for a job in London who missed multiple (almost imperceptible) cues to promote himself; likewise, the interviewers did not take into account/did not know/did not realize that promoting oneself is not an acceptable practice in his culture. Another area of research that looks interesting is cross-gender (mis)communication, which works on the assumption that genders are almost separate cultures.

We got a taste of the microanalysis in class this week, looking over transcripts of conversations and trying to find and interpret the contexualization cues. Repetition turned out to be an important feature for creating solidarity in a conversation (though that doesn't go across the board-- every situation is different). What I liked about the exercise was how similar it felt to literary analysis, taking apart the smallest features and finding meaning in them.

Code Switching

I'm excited. All right, I know I said that in the last post. But now, in addition to autumn, I'm excited about a symposium I've registered for, on African & Diasporic Languages. One of the recommended readings is on Code Switching, which is using different languages within a conversation. This immediately brought to mind a trip I took to Germany with my grandmother in 2003; we visited her cousin and uncle, and it was a quadri-lingual affair. My grandmother spoke Romanian with her cousin and uncle, her cousin spoke German with her family, her family spoke English with me, and everyone who knew Hungarian reserved that for curses and other colorful language. So I suppose the code switching there was between Romanian and Hungarian. I can sort of guess at the significance of it, in my very vague, impressionistic understanding of the two cultures and languages and their histories. I've been told Hungarian just has better swear words. I wish I knew more of the language than I do; all I can say is the arcane greeting, "I kiss your hand" and "igen" (yes).

In any case, I'm looking forward to the symposium.

Diseased Articles

In Grammar class last night we were talking about articles and why certain proper nouns take the definite article and others don't. One reason is shared situational-cultural knowlege. We use "the" when all members of the discourse know about the noun, as in the sun, the moon, the diner, etc. A lengthy discussion ensued regarding diseases.

Why do we say the mumps, the measles, and the plague but not the AIDS or the cancer? What's so strange and silly about saying "I've got the cancer"? (One person pointed out that Forrest Gump said his mother had the cancer.)

One hypothesis was related to historical linguistics. At some point in time many people got measles, mumps, and black plague, so it became shared cultural knowledge and thus took on the definite article. Perhaps, then, as AIDS and cancer become even more embedded in society, they will also take on "the."

Do I smell a research project?

word coinage: Clogosphere

Clogosphere:

N. The thousands (millions?) of blogs of no consequence, "clogging" the internet.

I thought I was a genius, making this word up (see Anca's ego; see Anca's ego puff). Then I googled it and realized it already existed, with varying defintions (see Anca's ego deflate). I hope that if I'm a clogger it is in the more innocuous sense, that is, of no consequence. The other sense being corporate with nefarious intentions. To my knowledge, I am not secretly an evil corporation.

But I do so enjoy the growing lexicon, which *sounds* like an evil corporation.

Aks the aminals about pasghetti

Neat thing I learned this week:

"Bird" and "first" used to be "brid" and "frist" in Old English. So the switching of sounds within a word (called metathesis if you must know) eventually solidified, changing the standard of English we use today.