Labelling, language and ethics

A recent twitter exchange reminded me that I have often been in discussions or even arguments where 'labelling' is thrown out at some point. It is often thrown out when one party feels that nuances are being lost or sometimes when someone is attempting to play a variety of victimhood trump card. The tweet that started me off re-musing about this was this:

Twitter / Notifications: Are all labels as attempts to describe another essentially acts of judgement? Label free speech?

To which I replied:

Of course: but 'judgment' understood as 'attempted discernment' vs 'prejudce'; some = self-take

And then also:

Meaning what by 'label'? Where does noun end & label begin? Speech acts by def are ltd gestures

What I was trying to gesture at with these necessarily brief responses (hey, they're tweets!) is that labels are, viewed from one angle, a way of referring to someone else. They are nouns. Sometimes they are nouns which those who are referred to are comfortable with or even choose for themselves. Sometimes, however, they are nouns that the refered-to dislike and would prefer not to be used. I sense that often 'labelling' is used to refer to this latter kind of noun-use. This is because nouns don't only have dispassionate meanings but also have emotional connotations which are part of their use-meaning and if the connotations are disparaging then they cannot be used equally by all parties to the dialogue equally: the use of a disparaging term will constantly be alienating and tension-building to at least one party.

The problem with the term 'labelling' is that it can get used as a catch-all term to try to disallow an(y) attempt to briefly characterise something that someone would rather not talk about at all even when there is no real negative connotation.

The solutions to the snarl ups, I think, are to find mutually acceptable terms where there is a genuine issue about a term and to remain aware that labels are 'limited gestures' and to be prepared to learn more fully and sympathetically about their referents.

Finding mutually acceptable terms is important. The solution here is not to disallow using any term at all: clearly if something is to be talked about, ways of refering need to be agreed. All language is about a communal agreement in order to carry meaning from mind to mind; it is mind reading by mediation and the mediation has to be a communally agreed instrument (vs Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's story). In fact languages are constantly in the process of being agreed, misagreed and disagreed, and it is in that dynamic linguistic-communal dialogue that accusations such as 'labelling' themselves make sense. They are a bid to steer the terms of the rhetoric.

Mutually acceptable terms is a way to recognise the bona fides of the parties in the discussion. To insist on using a disparaging term against objections is, in effect, to communicate contempt for the other. But note that the alternative is not to cease to give a label for that would mean ceasing to talk about the matter. No, the alternative to a disparaging label is to find a noun which is able to serve as a helpful token in conversation towards mutually-satisfactory ends.

The other dimension I mentioned above is to recognise the limitedness of labels. Actually, this is to recognise the limitedness of language and that 'labels' are actually a particular kind of noun (signifier, if you will). In short, what I mean by this is that I cannot convey to you the fulness of what is in my mind when I speak or write. Language is like using a two-dimensional artefact to try to convey a four-dimensional reality. It is 'lossy'.

To use language we have to choose a focus from the total of the (already limited) reality we are aware of and we have to find verbal gestures to help someone else find our focus. We then (in actual fact simultaneously) have to choose further dimensions of related bits of reality (usually our attitudes and reasons for interest are involved) to incorporate into the verbal gesturing. We do this drawing on the presumption of shared information in order to achieve the compression necessary to make a message. In effect we are hoping each time that from the limited information we can convey, the other mind will be able to reconstruct enough of our intentions for a part of our mind to be read through the medium of our speech act.

So it's no surprise that labels do not convey fully the reality of what is referred to. And since we are also inevitably conveying something of our attitudes, it is no surprise that in any community-crossing conversations, we may have to recognise that attitudes or beliefs encoded in our own usual use of the term may have to be challenged and re-negotiated for the purposes of civil and civilising conversation. Clearly this implies that the the problem is not the label itself, it is our unwillingness to be challenged and to accommodate others' views. In that we are at the edge of attitudinal matters to do with stereotyping, contempt, self-justification etc.

In the light of what I've just written, the "act of judgement" issue in the original tweet can be understood more clearly. Any use of language involves us in judging what to focus on, what is relevant, what attitudes to 'it' we convey, where lines of demarcation are to be drawn etc etc. We cannot speak without such judgements, or as I put it in response, "discernment". The question is what attitudes are being conveyed (and that includes both sent and received)? And it is the attitudes that are really in view. The problem is that the labels can themselves become the rhetorical point at issue rather than the attitudes. The easiest way around this is to try to remove the label by agreeing terms: either not to use a particular term or to mutually accept a term on the understanding that it is being used in a certain way.

Of course, part of the problem is that we hear linguistic usages in a sense through the ears of the communities we know. So the individual conversation also has to take account of the wider social context. So, while you and I might agree to use a term in a relatively neutral fashion for the sake of advancing our understanding, we also have to conduct the conversation knowing that others may hear it differently. And so, for the sake of taking the fruits of our better understanding (I would hope that might be the outcome) to our wider communities, we may be best to agree to use terms (labels) which would be best received by our respective communities and yet also have the best chance to convey to them the better understandings we arrive at and also to foster those communities in a wider inter-communal conversation.

So, in the conversation that began this reflection, I was eschewing the terms "conservative" and "liberal" in (popular) ecclesiological contexts. I was doing so as an attempt to agree different terms for conversation because I feel that these terms do not help me to think about the issues. They sound Political to me and that jars: I may be 'conservative' in terms of accepting a reasonably orthodox interpretation of Christian faith, but I tend to think that doing so implicates me in taking a far from conservative view of social matters. On the other hand "liberal" may better describe many of my attitudes to social issues, but not how I view doctrine, scripture, the relationship between God and world etc etc. So I tend to use the terms "orthodox" and "open" to try to signal that what I think is a linkage in the wider world between "conservative" faith and "Conservative" politics and between "liberal" politics and "liberal" faith is not in operation here.

I judge it is harder to change the terms in the wider world (for a variety of reasons) so it is easier to change my own self desgination and then to try to have the conversations about why I would want to do that. To me that is better than to have a sense or even the experience of being written off because of the label or of being unwittingly co-opted also because of the label. (It's embarrassing or anxiety-provoking to find oneself wanting to challenge someone who assumed that you shared some viewpoint of theirs).

I guess, with reference to the original tweet as presented above, that I do not think that "judgement" is necessarily negative or disparaging. It is possible to label positively and to judge in favour. It is not the act of judging that is the problem in reality. it is judging to the detriment of others, to do so unfairly on the basis of a characteristic that is not inherently negative and to refuse to revisit the issue of the fairness of the judgement. We need to focus on the attitudes not the act of judgement.

Attack of the the Grammar Nazis: here's the Home Guard

Although it might be fun to weigh in on the matter picked out by this headline:
Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove, I'm actually more interested in why the chastisers, the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards. "The award is intended to draw attention to "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better".

Now there's something wrong right there before we even get into the detail. It's the phrase 'should know better'. In other words, we are being introduced to the land of privilege and put-down and language is being rolled out as a way to mark who is 'one of us' and who is not. This is an exercise in group elitism and looking down ones nose at 'those people'. So let's immediately be prepared to ignore or even mock some of what they say. We should recall that, in effect, this is users of Elite English asserting their supposed superiority.

In fact not everything the judges say is wrong-headed: sometimes we do need to pay attention to how written language has to work in distinction to spoken, and that means learning things about how to signal words are grouped or actually not grouped, so the use of commas and hyphens and even apostrophes is quite useful for such things. However, there are signs that a lot of what this is about is pet peeves by grammar nazis motivated by a vision of language purity every bit as abitrary and prejudiced as racism.

Apparently Tesco are wrong for "using adjectives as nouns". You mean like national monuments "To the fallen" and the like? Selectivity, I think. Common shopfloor use -bad: national monument use -good.

And I have to confess I couldn't work out what this was referring to:
Transport for London was attacked for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign. I'm finding it hard to imagine what that is referring to. But the point would be that if it communicates well-enough to the majority of users, then it is good enough and that would imply that it is using grammar in a way that is understandable to that majority. Since right and wrong in language actually only ever are to do with agreed conventions and statistical likelihood, this means that is it is probably nonsensical to describe it as wrong. I suspect that what is meant is something like "not our cup of tea in the phraseology department, don't you know". Though I'm prepared to learn that in an attempt at succinctness, just like newspaper headlines, a crash blossom has occured. The annoying thing about this particular award is that the examples don't seem to be online.

"Gwynne's attack opened with a consideration of the phrase "demands too much too young"."
Well clearly that sentence is understandable by even the detractors, which indicates that there is something about the way it is structured that 'makes sense'. So don't let's give in to suggestions that it is ungrammatical, perhaps 'differently grammared' from Elite English. Here's what is said about that phrase.

"Presumably they mean something like 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much', but, as worded, it simply is not English," he said. "In that sentence as worded, 'too young' can only be two adverbs, 'too' qualifying the adverb 'young', and 'young' qualifying the verb 'demands', as would, for instance, 'soon' or 'early'. But 'young' is an adjective, and cannot ever be an adverb. And it certainly is not doing the work of an adjective in that sentence, because there is no noun that could be 'understood' and which would turn that sentence into English."

 I think we're actually dealing with elipsis here. "Too young" clearly refers to (presumably) antecedantly mentioned 'children' and so is understood adjectivally. Admittedly the phrase is pushing at the boundaries of understandable (see what I did there?), but to attempt to woodenly analyse 'young' as adverbial, relating to 'demands' is a sort of over-literal and under-imaginitive thing to do. The fact that the antecedant 'children' is not in the sentence is neither here nor there. If they are live in the mind because they are the topic of this bit of the discourse, then it is normal for English speakers to miss out saying or writing something like Nevile Gwynne's own reconstruction: "[when children are] too young [to be ready for so much]". Gwynne seems to be calling for a mandatory 11 words when 2 will do. The ease with which he appears to have (re)constructed the fuller phrase demonstrates that the linguistic tactic the writers used actually works. Hoist by his own petard.

He goes on:

"In the second clause, 'Little account is taken' is understood before the words 'that young children need'," he said. "But there is no such verb as 'to take account' but only 'to take account of' as in the first clause of that sentence. The second clause of the sentence is simply illiterate."

 So the whole phrase is 'Little account is taken that young children need'. Except that you can't insert an 'of' in that phrase. One tactic would be to rephrase: perhaps '.. is taken of the fact that ...'. but that's a bit clumsy, so attempting to use the usual 'verb + that + phrase' is smoother. I confess that it isn't a form I would naturally use, but it is a usage which is understandable and if picked up by a number of English speakers could become quite unremarkable. I suspect for many it already is. In a sense it's a new grammatical rule about dropping prepositions in such phrases. It's not that it's wrong; it's that it is new and jars on the expectations of Elite-English speakers

In the end, we should be focussing not on conformity with Elite-English as defined by these upper-middle class professionals, but on clarity. And (see what I did there?) clarity can be bad even when grammar is 'good'. To be sure many 'ordinary' English speakers need to learn Elite-English, but not to be correct. Rather they/we need to learn it in order to fit in, make arguments and otherwise extract value from the elite. We need to play their game sometimes, but it doesn't mean they're right, merely powerful.

I would like to give a couple of cheers to Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham, who said "I think we should be concerned when things overstep certain marks but... English grammar... is actually a plurality of grammars (from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22378402). Well said. Plurality will entail difference.

Well, let's have a look at a few infelicities here. Same topic but this time comment by Michael Moran. "Bad grammar. We all know it when we hear it, but we don't necessarily know why." Well, clearly that's not true: who is this 'we' because some people don't heare what Elite-English users hear as ungrammatical. And yet, strangely, 'they' hear Elite-English usages as strange and unwieldy and reeking of privilege and snobbery. In 'their' terms those usages are ungrammatical and lack street cred. Genuinely ungrammatical sentences we do know and the reason we wouldn't know why is that the bit of our minds and brains that processes language is not, in most people, connected up to the verbalising-rationalising bits. And, incidentally, in terms of Elite-English, the sentence "Bad Grammar." is not a grammatical sentence; there is no verb in the sentence. Ironic, eh?

At least Michael Moran tries to acknowledge that there's a degree of social relativity involved even if he can't quite let go of the notions of right and wrong in grammar understood in the traditionalist sense that he unsuccessfully tries to distance himself from.

It's just mild hothousing when I correct my daughter's grammar, but it would be pretty annoying if I were to chide adults for writing "should of". Telling strangers in a pub that they should say "she was sitting" rather than "she was sat" would probably result in a glassing.

 Well, we've got some confusions there. 'Should of' is a misanalysis of speech sounds ("should've" would save the day): not strictly a grammatical error: the speaker would still be using a perfect tense modified by a modal verb; they've just spelt it wrong. To be sure it (the spelling) could be corrected by becoming aware of the grammatical structure of what they've written, but they are clearly using a modally-modified perfect tense.

'Was sat' is just normal in some forms of English. In any case, it could be analysed as emphasising the seatedness of the person in question; in my understanding of the sentence, there is a semantic difference to 'was sitting'.

But, oh dear ... "I picked up some useful stuff about split infinitives from reading Clive James's reviews of Star Trek in the Observer". Because, of course, there is no such thing as a split infinitive strictly; two words are made to be split in a way that a single Latin word isn't. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brotes and other members of the EngLit canon did use English in a way that sometimes inserted adverbs between the antecedant 'to' and a following verb 'stem', and we can see that this 'proper' English is very silly indeed.

Now I like his attempt to make a politically correct argument which makes it sound all compassionate:

Right now unprecedented numbers of non-native English speakers are living in Britain. They have learned their English from textbooks, not from birth as I did. They'll probably never think in English.
Most of us know the stress of translating on-the-fly when we're on holiday. Imagine feeling that pressure for the rest of your life. Removing the stabilisers of grammar from the bike of language isn't clever – it's cruel.

The problem is that it doesn't work. The kinds of things he is concerned about in usage of English are not, on the whole about having no grammar but rather having different grammar or making spelling errors based on sound. So there's no question about 'removing the stabilisers of grammar' -its more like which brand of stabilisers you have. The only language users who don't use grammar appear to be chimpanzees who have learnt sign langugae signs. They consistently fail to get syntax; they just string two or three signs together haphazardly and let context be our guide.

And finally, he writes "at some point in the future, voice command is likely to overtake keyboard input as our primary method of controlling computers. It's sensible to remove ambiguity from language as much we can before we reach that point. " Well, as I've pointed out earlier, at least some of what he has picked up is actually spelling errors which, presumably, a speech-to-text machine would deal with. As to the 'ambiguity' issue, well that's the case with whatever variety of English, and in fact most of the difficulties we have in writing are pretty much disambiguated by the intonation and phrasing of spoken language. And in any case, the point about human machine interfaces is to get to the point where we don't need to train the humans to use the machines, because the machines will understand the humans -in several dialects if necessary.

Pseudo-education & linguistic prescriptivism

It's really nice to find someone not only making points that I have every so often made in this blog, but doing so with the kind of passion I also feel about it: See here Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism | Metaphor Hacker: here are some bits I particularly liked.

“educated” people go about spouting nonsense when it comes to language. This nonsense seems to have its origins in half-remembered injunctions of their grade school teacher. And because the prime complainers are likely to either have been “good at language” or envied the teacher’s approbation of those who were described as being “good at language”, what we end up with in the typical language maven is a mishmash of linguistic prejudice and unjustified feeling smug superiority. Every little linguistic label that a person can remember, is then trotted out as a badge of honor regardless of how good that person is at deploying it.

It's that linguistic prejudice and smug superior feeling that gets me. I find galling the misplaced self-assurance of being 'right' about for example, so-called split infinitives. Misplaced becasuse it doesn't stand up to more than about 30 seconds of more careful thought about the nature of culture, language and the construction of 'authority'. So it's right that ...

those who spout the loudest, get a reputation of being the “grammar experts” and everybody else who preemptively admits that they are “not good at grammar” defers to them and lets themselves be bullied by them.

Quite so; I have people in mind who fit the loud spouting description ... So kudos to Dominik for calling out one of these spouters, here's a relevant excerpt:

People who spell they’re, there and their interchangeably know the grammar of their use. They just don’t differentiate their spelling. It’s called homophony ... all languages have some high profile homophones that cause trouble for spelling Nazis but almost never for actual understanding. Why? Because when you speak, there is no spelling.

And the real issue therefore is simply about efficiency and clarity in a visual medium which has fewer sensory channels to offer the message (pitch, gesture, facial expression, speed of delivery are all lost in writing). The point is the way that this kind of censure-ship is actually part of a sign-system which is about power and status and therefore has the potential to create feelings of shame or disempowerment and so constitue un-agapaic behaviour and even perpetuate hegemonic situations.

 when pseudo-knowledge about language is used as an instrument of power, I think it is right to call out the perpetrators and try to shame them. Sure, linguists laugh at them, but I think we all need to follow the example of the Language Log and expose all such examples to public ridicule. Countermand the power.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

Linguistic prejudice in editing copy for publication

This is fascinating. Okay some of it is about housestyle and some of it is about readability, but some of it is sheer linguistic prejudice where recognition of a certain diversity in dialect or register should be given. Check out The Most Common Edits and note that while there are three or four fair-enough comments, there are also two or three well-dodgy ones.

In fact it's faintly amusing that the way this one is introduced actually needed editing by me and I'm still not sure it makes sense (phrase containing word 'petard' comes to mind).

the writer putsneither or not only before a verb, and then fails to supply a verb for the matching nor orbut also: “The investigation could neither account for the missing cupcakes nor for the fact that there was a secret door in the back of the manager’s office.” Some readers can skim right past a sentence like that; others will shudder

In fact, not only do I skim past it, I can't even see what the issue is. I think I'm a pretty good user of English, I therefore think that this level of pernickety-ness is OTT: the shudderers should get a life and learn that a vast swathe of English-speakers, natives at that, don't speak/write their variety and don't see why they should have to learn to. Give a little, guys.

Then there is this little gem:

pronouns sometimes fail to match the referent and its verb, especially when a collective noun is involved: “The restaurant continues to advertise their cupcakes.”

This is not a failure to match referent and verb: it's a variety of English usage whereby a third person singular following a gender-indefinite antecedent  may use 'their' or 'they'. It's perfectly respectable: Shakespeare and Jane Austen did it, it was only Victorian grammar Nazis who disallowed it on spurious pseudo-logical grounds.

People who edit: it's about time you recognised that you are ill served by some of this grammer Nazi prejudice: lighten up.
People who suck their teeth when someone uses, for example, 'their' for an indefinite though singular antecedant (sic): other people have to learn to recognise and put up with your English usage when it differs from theirs: do the decent thing and reciprocate.
People who write: by all means learn to shorten sentences, keep phrasing closer together and recognise that punctuation is to help your readers compensate for the lack of intonation and body language. But you are entitled to your own variety of English and to challenge the prejudices of those who claim they don't like any variety but their own. They need to loosen up; why should putting up with different varieties be a one way traffic in their favour.

Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar'

At last -a voice in a national 'paper that's articulating a point of view that is linguistically coherant:

There is just "the grammar" and one of the great failings of education today is that neither teachers or pupils know it. In fact, we would neither be able to speak nor understand if we didn't know it. A three-year-old who says "I bringed it" is expressing the grammar through the structure she has learned which indicates past happenings. It just so happens that the "ed" ending isn't the customary way of doing it with that verb. So she knows "grammar" but not the grammar of that particular word in that particular context

Quite so: if you and I can understand it or at least come up with a couple of possible interpretations, then grammar has likely been used (and the real arguments about 'correctness should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity). "Correct" is usually an attmept to assert one dialect over another; normally a so-called standard English over a regional or socio-cultural variety. And let's make no bones about it: the English being asserted is actually the dialect that happens to be the one traditionally favoured by those in government and historically derives from that used by landed plutocrats. They assumed  others would speak like them if they were important. -You would know the ruled by their lack of mastery of the King's English ie, as used at court, and the by those without access to the money to educate their children in elite institutions. It's time for the rest of us to stop playing that game with them.

The truth is that the rest of us have as much right as the elite to put our cultural artefacts 'out there' and that includes our speech forms.

language is owned and controlled by everybody and what we do with it seems to be governed by various kinds of consent, operating through the social groups of our lives. Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

It's time to stop talking about 'correctness' and name the beast for what it is: cultural prejudice and power games. Comprehension not spurious correctness should be the sole or at least main test. The arguments about 'correctness' should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity and the most appropriately to the audience. And incidentally this criterion would show that elite-speakers are often less than able communicators if their socio-linguistic privilege is removed -they often rely on the fact that others are expected to speak like them to avoid having to understand and speak in other forms. It's the intra-English equivalent of English speakers tending not to learn other languages because 'everyone' speaks English.

Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar' | Michael Rosen | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Teaching science through language

For me it was interesting to read this post at the end of a week when I'd twice said to different people that I do have a science bachground since Linguistics is a science. It's interesting to see this perspective beefed up big-time:

Language provides a wealth of data available from the students themselves — data with questions that beg to be asked, making everyday phenomena surprisingly unfamiliar and requiring explanation. Linguistics is at the core of cognitive science, offering incomparable ways to understand the nature of the human mind. The biological capacity for language appears to be shaped in part by genetic information and in part by information gained through childhood experience. Scientists have sought to tease that information apart, and this work has yielded good explanations in some domains and a body of understanding that can be made accessible to middle school and high school students

Interestingly I also use language to help teach cultural analysis for similar reasons: its proximity to all of us and the way that it scales to culture more widely.
Language Log � Teaching science through language

Texting research: dilemma for grammar marms

Fascinating and ironic: This research into the way that frequent users of textisms compare with others in accepting nealogisms. The article reporting the research is here:
Texting affects ability to interpret words
The findings, I think, may present a dilemma for those who enjoy a good moan about how English language is going to the dogs -see if you can see why:

... reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging used among youth or 'generation text'. She says reading encourages flexibility in language use and tolerance of different words. It helps readers to develop skills that allow them to generate interpretable readings of new or unusual words. "In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study,"

Yes, I' sure you see it: At first it seems to offer comfort that texting really might have an adverse affect on your English usage. But, oh dear, it's in the ability to appreciate and respond to new words and usages -the very kind of thing that the grammar marms are allso keen to discourage and tut at. Who'd have thought it grammar marms and texters sharing the same linguistic vice! Hope they enjoy the company ;)

newly minimal proof of everyday grammatical know-how

A few years back I started noticing some educated southern British English speakers were fronting the vowel in 'good'. I think that perhaps this may be part of the same trend that has now given rise to what in my speech are homophones becoming divergently pronounced according to the perception of the speaker as to grammatical analysis: see here...

in southeastern England /uː/ has developed two very distinct allophones: a truly back [uː] before tautosyllabic (or stem-final) /l/, but a fronted quality approaching [yː] in other positions. The kingly ruler, ˈruːlə, is taken as transparently bimorphemic, rule#(e)r, so retains the back uː of rule; but the measuring ruler, ˈryːlə, has lost touch with its origins and is taken as an unanalysable unit, with a corresponding clear l and fronted vowel yː.

And, incidently, this is a riposte to those who reckon that 'certain people' have no grammar. Admittedly this is not knowingly done according to a morphological distinction, yet it shows very neatly that native speakers have, somewhere in their heads, a very sophisticated sense of grammar which can inform the operation of new forms of language.

John Wells’s phonetic blog: newly minimal:

A misuse of linguistics in theo-cultural comment

There are some good points made in this article and I think that the point -as I understand it- of transcending a blame-victim mentality, is a good one (after all I have recently made similar arguments):
TheOOZE beta | evolving spirituality. � The End of Blame (by Brittian Bullock).
But I would advise the reader to start at paragraph four to avoid an off-putting misapplication of linguistics. I'm really sorry to do a bit of a cutting things out job on this, but it really is hard to read some of these things with a linguistics background in place. I'd encourage Brittian to develop the basic insight (best put in the last couple of paragraphs) which I really think are helpful, but to ditch the linguistics, and the reason for that is what I'll note down below.

Here's the first faux pas: "The English language is structured very aggressively. It’s officially a S-V-O type. Which means that full and proper sentences contain a subject, a verb, and an object (and in that order)"

Yes, English is S-V-O. How is that 'aggressive'? That value judgement has no real genesis within the simple fact of syntactic system; it's hard to know where it's come from. Or why a VSO language such as Hebrew or Japanese isn't 'agressive'. It's the choice of verbs and nouns that achieves 'aggressive' language not the syntax per se. Because the syntax has to be used for both pacific and aggressive -and other- moods and descriptions, it is relatively 'neutral'.

Similarly, "In SVO language there is [sic] always three things present. First there is definitely an action–something’s happening. Second there is a clear object or person it is happening to. And thirdly there is absolutely a subject inacting what’s happening." Yes that's true enough (I'll not quibble for the moment, it's broadly okay). However, that is a description of the roles that are necessarily implied by a transitive verb. Case grammar, for example, is an attempt to construct an approach to grammar that starts with such basic semantic relationships rather than rules for relative ordering of elements (again simplifying). Those relationships are logical and universal and not inherent in SVO languages; VSO have the same things to try to express, they just do it slightly differently.

So, the next move: "thirdly there is absolutely a subject inacting what’s happening. There is always a victim. There is always someone to blame. “Johnny kicked the dog.” is an example of this. The poor dog is being victimized and little Johnny is at fault. ... our brain is constantly throwing around systems of blame." The 'victim' is only properly a victim in sentences where something violent or oppressive is being described or implied. Otherwise we are simply talking about the grammatical object who might in other circumstances be the recipient of a gift ("Johnny stroked the dog" or "Johnny fed the dog") or perhaps the something more neutral ("Johnny saw the dog" or "Johnny called the dog").

And so this is a valid point: "But what if there was an additional sentence I tagged on to the beginning of the earlier phrase about Johnny and his dog? “the dog bit Johnny. Johnny kicked the dog.” well it changes things doesn’t it? Suddenly Johnny doesn’t look so bad."
It just doesn't need the mistaken linguistic analysis that preceded it. The valid point about that is simply about what information is communicated and could be summed up with the old adage 'circumstances alter cases'.

"In fact the Garden/Fall narrative in genesis holds similarities"; yes, and it's told originally in a VSO language; blaming can be done through either syntactic system, clearly. I'm all for a good chunk of what is written about blaming in this article, I'm (as someone with linguistic training) not at all helped by the misleading language analogies.

Then we have another not uncommon but still unhelpful language strategy that a number of preachers and writers engage in. In this article we find it here: "Glory literally means fullness or wholeness". This is a form of the etymological fallacy; the idea that a word (typically, but not exclusively) means "properly" (or "literally" or "correctly" even) what its etymological origins did. This simply isn't so; we need to pay attention to how it is being used in its context (linguistic, social etc). It's etymology may even be misleading as a guide to what a writer or speaker may mean in the present context.

Untranslatable Words -not quite true, is it?

I love these words, and I love it that they can't be translated by a single English word or short phrase.
20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World:
But it's not quite true to say that they are "examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless." After all, they each have a short 'definition' in English. So English doesn't fall speechless (especially as 'tartle' is a word from an English dialect!). Merely has to be a bit more prolix. This is important because we don't want to fall into strong linguistic determinism, do we?

The more change the more it's the same

I think that this winter I shall be trying to get down to the British Library because this exhibition is just up my street. It's reported here: 'I wrote 2U B4'! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century | Science | guardian.co.uk

There are a number of things in the article I enjoyed and this was a new information for me: "The well-intentioned Victorian pamphlet Poor Letter H advised its mostly lower middle class readers that if they really want to get on in life, they should be saying house, not 'ouse, and head, not 'ead. But the book also says the H should remain silent in words such as hospital and herb."
Which is presumably why Frasier (and other north Americans) talks about "drawing an 'erbal bath" -the nAm's haven't heard that Euro-Anglo's weren't convinced and so steadfastly hold to the advice to this day. I'm wondering whether it has something to do with the relatively new fad for TV presenters and others to talk about "staying at an 'otel". I was brought up to pronounce the 'h' and it seems to me that dropping it has only been seen as 'sophisticated' sometime in the last ten years or so (or did I miss something?).

Of course it also relates to that lovely piece of stupidity: school children being told to drop the initial sound (okay there are phonetic problems with that statement but let's set them aside) of 'H' so to pronounce it "aitch" rather than "haitch". I say 'stupidity', of course, because the logic is that the name of the letter should, surely, contain the sound!

Ah well: I wonder whether 'honour', 'heir' and the like will eventually acquire the H's that a number of readers will often give them?

 

Pop accent, American English and worship

At college, when listening to those who are lead singers in chapel, it is sometimes very clear that they may have learnt the music from an American source. Interestingly, unlike pop music, quite a lot of lead singers in a worship setting don't actually use north American pronunciation features in singing, but some do. In doing so they are probably signalling a psychological reality, for them, of the social domain of singing rock or pop music; it is a domain in which certain features are expected to be used* and for them, perhaps, contemporary worship music is in the 'pop' domain.

Some research from New Zealand was done on NZ pop singers and their performance accents: Pop accent comes naturally�(Science Alert). Actually I was a bit disappointed, at least by the reporting. This is because of a mismatch between the stated aim: "research at AUT University’s Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication looked at why we pronounce words differently when we sing." However, the news article doesn't say all that much and without the actual article, I'm speculating as to the whys that may actually be given and the results. The news article certainly didn't seem to really answer the question except to say that it happened. My understanding of what it does actually say is that it seems to happen because pop singing is a domain where an Americanised accent is expected (and that the meanings of a NZ accent in pop music therefore relate to comedy etc). So maybe (and this is my speculation) the 'why' really is simply that people pick it up just as they pick up more standard or more local variants for use in appropriate circumstances. In which case americanised English in pop music is mainly, probably, a statement saying, in effect, that what is being performed is 'pop' rather than (say) folk and the performance is being construed in solidarity with the traditions of pop music. It is a claim to be taken to be performing within that frame of understanding.

So the question I'm pondering is what is the meaning of using or not using an americanised accent in leading worship or even in singing our own worship? Is it a bringing of our own cultural repertoire into worship or is it a loss of 'authenticity'? Certainly, I wondered several times whether to ask a particular lead-singer whether they could lead in their own voice because the change was so marked from their own normal accent and I actually found it more difficult to sing along because I do normally sing worship in more-or-less my own normal accent and to be led in such a different accent with all the suasion that brings to move ones own expression to match that of the lead. So maybe that's the issue about this in leading worship: if a congregation normally sing in an americanised accent than, fine, but if they normally worship in their own, then use of a more 'normal' accent is called for. And part of the issue then is not to restrict 'worship' to singing; what accent(s) is/are used to express said prayers and preaching?

I'd say that there are other things we might want to consider in this case too. There is the socio-economo-political one about how we situate ourselves in respect of American hegemony (though this is a convoluted matter, historically**). It may be that if we wish to take seriously a somewhat resistant stance to the dominant Powers (cf Keesmaat and Walsh, Colossians Re:mixed), then we may want to encourage local rather than mid-Atlantic voices in worship, for example. Another is how far we judge such register switching to be 'authentic'; that is how far it is heard or felt as 'natural' or alienating; does it distance worshippers from their worship (for example, by tending to push it into a 'performance' category like Karaoke and thus making it rather than God the focus)? Theologically, the issues can be seen, then, to revolve around an 'incarnational' trajectory which affirms the indigenous and values the marginalised (cf Lamin Sanneh's work on the effects of vernacular Bible translations: affirming African languages and vernacular cultures).


*Typically the markers of 'pop English' are post-vocalic r (ie the r is sounded after vowels unlike southern British English), the reduction of /ai/ to /a:/ (so 'I' will be typically pronounced 'ah') and quite often the vowel in 'on'/'God' is lowered (so that to Brit ears it tends to sound more like 'ah'). There are a bunch of other little linguistic tells that also go with this (the treatment of intervocalic 't', nasalisation etc), so that list is not exclusive, just the more obvious features. Of course there are often (amusingly to the linguistically aware) hypercorrections; intrusive 'r' where the re-introduction of post-vocalic are is overextended to areas where it never would be in n.Am. English.

**A number of years ago, one of my university profs (the relatively famous Peter Trudgill, a major sociolinguist) did an occasional lecture on accent in pop music in which he outlined how much pop music was done in an Americanised accent. In fact, he pointed out, it is done in a somewhat southern n.American accent because it is betraying its origins/roots in black music (I'll leave readers to recall histories of pop music which should put that connection in context). One of the interesting things he noted though was that punk rock had tended to 'allow' if not encourage singers to use British features in contradistinction to n. American a tradition which can still sometimes be heard in newer music which inherits the punk style. This leads to an extra and ironic amusement to be found in the film Jumpin' Jack Flash, where Whoopi Goldberg's character is trying to decipher Mick Jagger's black-n.Am English accent ...

Language Driven By Culture, Not Biology

This may be a blow to certain readings of Chomskyan Universal grammar. The article summarising the findings is here: Language Driven By Culture, Not Biology, Study Shows. In sum, this is what the research seems to indicate: "it is unlikely that humans possess a genetic ‘language module’ which has evolved by natural selection. The genetic basis of human language appears to primarily predate the emergence of language."
What I'm not sure about, though, is that although it would appear that biology cannot evolve as fast as culture, does this mean that there is no biological basis for language as such or that there is simply no basis for its diversity? This seems to be what is meant later in the article; "We conclude that slow-changing genes can drive the structure of a fast-changing language, but not the reverse." I think that means that there could be a biologically-based universal grammar of which actual instantiations of language would be declensions. What that would require in evolutionary terms, would surely be merely the evolution of a 'starting point' 'module' for language. Something that would give the basic structures. The fact that there are families of people (admittedly rare) where there appears to be a genetically based language disability in syntax, seems to indicate at least some 'nature' as well as nurture.
But maybe I've misunderstood something here.

Archaic English, the book of Mormon and religious English

An interesting article in Language Log Language Log � Archaic English verb endings and the Book of Mormon, where we are reminded of some interesting grammatical mistakes in the Book of Mormon.

And that the Urim and Thummim breastplate did not aid the grammarless translator, or his uninspired amanuensis, or even his village printer, is evident from such eccentric irregularities and bold departures from the "well of English undefiled" as:
“thou remembereth” (page 27); "and I have not written but a small part of the things I saw" (page 35); "therefore they did not look unto the Lord as they had ought" (ibid.);…"and this he done" (page 225); "and the words of Amulek which was declared unto the people" (page 245); "now the object of these lawyers were to get gain" (page 251);…
I pause out of breath, with this result of a most cursory inspection of the inspired pages under examination

Now, the speculations about what this may or may not say about the alleged divine origins of said book are not entirely convincing, though the comments do help develop this aspect of the article.
Why I want to comment is to note the phenomenon of archaisms for religious speech. Needs more investigation but there surely is something to investigate: a number of Anglicisings of the Qur'an opt for KJV English (Pickthall being the most prominent). And then listen to what happens in programmes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed when they want to wheel out some serious ritual ...

So are we missing something important in terms of contextualisation in going for prayer in contemporary English?

Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously Thought

I'm still reflecting on the significance of this, but I think that it is important. I suspect over the next year or so, there will be further thoughts from various quarters. See the whole report here: Bonobos May Have Greater Linguistic Skills Than Previously Thought. The guts of the resulsts seem to be these:

After applying conversational analysis tools, Pedersen asserted that language is more than the simple act of transferring information, but a conversational interaction between active participants. Language-competent bonobos use lexigrams, which are made up of arbitrary symbols that represent words, as the basis for conversations with humans. Pedersen said linguistic aspects of the conversation included turn taking, negotiation, pauses and repetition, and went far beyond information sharing made possible through the use of lexigrams symbols.

Preliminary thoughts on my part: it seems to be that if there is the ability to use symbols and to form the idea of exchanging information, then turn-taking strategies are a natural outcome; so I'm not sure about how significant that is. I have a question about how far forward this takes us: it is already known that apes can use symbols if taught them, however it seems that they don't develop or 'get' syntax. So simple symbolising has an intrinsic entail of communication and it would be mere 'mechanics' to develop strategies of turn taking in exchanging symbols. I want to see more evidence about syntax and more complex semantics such as are developed in cultural exchanges. I think.

Incidently, as someone who is comfortable, theologically, with evolution as a mechanism/entail of creation, I don't really have a problem with linguistic abilities in other animals; in fact I would expect it to some degree. It's part of the implication, symbolically and theologically, of creating Adam from the dust of the earth.

How switching language can change your personality - being-human - 25 June 2008 - New Scientist

Now this is an intriguing piece of research: How switching language can change your personality - being-human - 25 June 2008 - New Scientist: It could be interpreted to support linguistic determinism but I would caution against that interpretation. However, we do need to take the implications on board. Here's what was discovered: "women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same events differently, depending on which language they were using at the time. It is known that people in general can switch between different ways of interpreting events and feelings – a phenomenon known as frame shifting. But the researchers say their work shows that bilingual people that are active in two different cultures do it more readily, and that language is the trigger."
My caution would be based on the whole thing about 'framing', and it would be a simple recognition that different cultures do tend to value various things differently and where these are linguistically marked, the connotative meanings tend to push the framing in certain directions. This is not the same as saying that people are bound to reach certain conclusions by linguistic conditioning or that we cannot reach other conclusions or take on board other frames, merely that it would take more effort to do so. It would also indicate that changing metaphors, frames, dialect etc could unlock greater facilities in conceptualising differently. In turn this would suggest that to achieve creative outcomes from consultations, meetings and decision-making proceedures, we would be best to aim for culturally diverse memberships.

uptalk

My thanks to Cath (uptalk description & references � ninetysix and ten:) for this intro into what is being called uptalk. The article referenced points out that there are vareties of English that use final rising intonation in 'ordinary', declarative sentences (one I hear a lot is in the NE of England, being as I live there!). The development is the occasional use in dialects of English that haven't had HRT before in that kind of sentence. My informal observation concurs with this characterisation of its apparent usage-meaning. "linguists who have analysed HRT have identified its positive discourse functions. It has been shown that HRT serves to track the listener’s comprehension and attention, especially when the speaker is presenting new information. Listeners perceive HRT to be deferential but friendly (Guy & Vonwiller 1984). It also acts as a turn-holding mechanism in narratives (e.g. Warren & Britain 1999).”
So now you know.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Chart Unicode “Keyboard”

This is great; an online IPA generator. əʔlæst
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Chart Unicode “Keyboard”

Effects of language on color discriminability

A very interesting set of experiments if you are at all interested in the matter of linguistic determinism, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the notion that language determines thought. At first this paper, Effects of language on color discriminability might seem to be saying that it does; language seems to affect our colour discrimination. But be careful; linguistic determinism says that the actual perception is determined by the language. The results here or more commensurate with seeing language as a secondary level beyond the basic perception:

"Because the effect of language can be altered by linguistic interference, it seems that
language is acting a secondary process in the color discrimination tasks used in these studies. This secondary process can alter the results or speed of a color judgment,but it seems more likely that this interference happens at a decision stage rather late in the processing stream."

That's not to say that language may not channel thought in some cases or make certain perspectives more likely among a language community, merely that it does not control fully. There is room for perceptions at variance with the language's predispositions. In the Genesis story of Adam naming the animals, God brings the animals to Adam to name and whatever name Adam gave, that was its name. I think that this is saying that there are boundaries: that God makes it that there are some things that are 'given' but within that we have a degree of freedom to 'name' (taxonomise, represent, divide and combine etc) and God is willing to let that stand, may even be enjoying what we make of 'it'. This seems to me to allow for linguistic determinism in a weak form in that it can be overturned by human creativity.

Je ne regrette rien: phonetics

Beyond the voice and the passion of the line in the famous song, typically, I find the linguistics of the song fascinating. So it was great to come upon this posting Language Log: Je ne regrette rien: phonetics and phonology: which draws attention to one of the things I notice, partly because I've been trying to imitate the words as la Piaf sings them: "she sings je ne regrette as something very much like [ʒnʁgʁɛt], although the first two consonants are certainly soft and indistinct".
It's the reason I find Parisian French so hard to understand compared with, say, southern or West African: the Parisian version seems to have a principle of removing schwa as much as possible, often resulting in Piafesque strings of consonants. (And getting the 'light touch' on the consonants is also not easy). I spend loads of processing time working out which consonants belong with which morpheme or word ... clearly I need more practice. That's the reason to look to visiting Paris on Eurostar ...