Once again I have the privilege of passing on one of Johanna's postings.
I like her note on humility. I'm afraid I let go of that quality a bit
in my response last night.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Johanna Rubba [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 12:16 AM
To: Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Cc: Johanna Rubba
Subject: Re: Language Change
Herb ... another one to post. You can start charging me per word, if
you like!
Here we all are talking about language change, prescriptivism, etc.,
etc., yet again. I, too, have my pet peeves (such as the conflation of
"infer" with "imply"). But I recognize that my response is mostly
emotional, with a dash of the discriminating perfectionist thrown in.
There is loss and gain in language change. The youngsters who use
"infer" to mean "imply" have introduced a new discourse marker into the
language, the much-despised "like". "Like" has two new functions: one
is a new quoting verb, similar to "say" or "go", as in "And then I
said, ..." - "And then I'm like, ... ". This is not adding much. But
the second new function is an addition: "like" functions as a focus
marker, singling out the newsiest bit of a person's message:
1. When Dad saw the broken window, he, like, exploded!
Notice the given-information subordinate clause; "like" is in the
second predicate, before the final word -- classic focus position.
The numbing repetition of the word is due to embedding focus within
focus:
2. I found myself, like, in the middle of this, like, huge crowd of
people who were all, like, stoned out of their minds!
The first "like" marks the new information of the whole predicate; the
second zeroes in on what was special about the crowd, and the third on
what was special about the people in the crowd.
One "like" in a sentence doesn't bother me much (in fact I use it
myself), but I have to admit that it drives me wild when it is every
other word. One of our profs here will not allow students to use the
word in his classes. They actually like it!
I doubt that many college students use focus-"like" in their writing.
As it is with me, it's a part of informal, spoken language. The
aforementioned prof's students probably like being trained to vary
their language style to suit a formal situation. This is something that
will serve them in our particular society.
And I think it is here to stay. My 4-year-old friend is already using
it.
Rather than calling language change neutral, it would be better to call
language itself neutral. Language is a tool; the users bend it to their
purposes. If you find language lacking, look to the minds of the users.
As Herb notes, languages serve the communicative needs of a population.
If it expands and contracts, that's because the needs or interests of
the population expand or contract.
As to "survival language" -- has someone resurrected Basil Bernstein,
with his "restricted code"? If you want survival language, go and live
among the peoples of Papua New Guinea's highlands; try to survive
without mastering their lexicon naming the plants, animals, weather,
soils, tools, processes, and lore by which they live. As Jared Diamond
says in his wonderful "Guns, Germs, and Steel", the peoples of the
Third (and, as a friend of mine used to say, Last) World are more
intelligent than many "civilized" people. They live by their lore and
by their wits, not by the supermarket and Google. They can name more
birds than sparrow, crow, robin, and seagull (well, now we can add
penguin). They can name more trees than oak, maple, palm, and "pine"
(used for pines, spruce, and firs by a very large number of people).
When a mechanical problem arises, they don't have the luxury of calling
AAA. They scare up whatever wire, rope, old pots and pans, hammers,
stones, whatever, and get about _solving a problem_ by improvisation.
I saw this many times when I lived in North Africa. Want an
intellectual challenge? Learn the Balinese calendar! Or live in a
society where you establish, within a few minutes of talk, precisely
how every other person in the tribe is related to each of you. Not
doing quantum physics or producing Operas doesn't make a tribe
"primitive". We spend millions building a tank so we can wait around
for a particle that _may_ exist to appear, and if we blink we might
miss its one appearance in decades. What would the Papuans think of
that?
It's insulting to claim that linguists who insist on the neutrality of
language change are limited in their understandings because they're
monolingual or have little experience of other cultures. First of all,
a large number of linguists speak several languages (and not all
Indo-European ones). Second, many linguists spend decades visiting or
living with the people whose languages they study, and have deep
insights into their culture as well as their language. Many study
language groups and families deeply -- the Semiticists, Africanists,
Americanists, and so on -- among us. But the really good ones are
humble about it. They know how much they don't know in comparison to
how much they do know. No knowledgeable linguist would claim that
anyone apart from a seriously cognitively-disabled person or a normal
2-year-old has a vocabulary of 200 words -- especially when their
encounters with that person took place "on the street". I wouldn't be
surprised if such a person, when hearing about these claims concerning
their vocabulary, would respond by saying "Sorry, it's not my culture
to jump to conclusions about people I know little or nothing about."
In case anyone is wondering, I don't use singular "they, their" out of
ignorance. It is a good choice of generic pronoun that speakers of
English made long ago, before elitist (and sexist) Renaissance scholars
started meddling with things. Objections based on its grammatical
plurality are specious; "you" is also grammatically plural, but no one
objects to using it to refer to a single person -- or dost thou, dear
reader?
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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