Texas Linguistics Forum Vol. 47 (2003)

Lisa Green, University of Texas at Austin
Syntactic and Semantic Patterns in Child African American English

Thorough descriptions of some areas of adolescent and adult African American English (AAE) have been presented in the literature over the past 40 years; however, the use of AAE by young children has received limited attention. In general, child AAE has been analyzed in the context of communication disorders in efforts to compare normally developing child AAE to impaired uses of the variety. Such studies have been designed to determine the extent to which child AAE speakers use specific isolated features of adolescent and adult AAE that were published in early feature lists characterizing the variety. Research in communication disorders has been targeted toward developing intervention strategies that are useful for treating children with speech and language impairments, so it has not always been concerned with the entire system of AAE that children acquire. In presenting findings from an ongoing study of the use of AAE by 3-, 4- and 5-year olds, I explain the syntactic and semantic patterns that child AAE speakers use and show the ways in which they develop a complete linguistic system, not just a list of features. In addition, I discuss data that provide insight into the way child AAE speakers use remote past BIN to mark the distant past and the way they use preterite had to mark events in narratives. The data description presented here sets the course for research on the early stages of acquisition of AAE.

Sean Hendricks, University of Georgia
Negotiation of Expertise in Fantasy Role-Playing Gaming

Scholars in the field of conversational interaction (Schlegloff, 1989; Jacoby & Gonzales, 1991) propose that the distinction between expert and novice in an interaction is not a dichotomous relationship that is maintained throughout the interaction. Instead, the distribution of expertise among participants in an interaction can be seen as fluid and dynamic, where participants are seen as “more-knowing” or “less-knowing” at different moments in the interaction. Jacoby and Gonzales (1991) examine the distribution of expertise in the discourse of a university physics group, showing how moment-by-moment ratification of expertise is achieved through various strategies.

Elissa Ikeda, University of California at Los Angeles
Socializing Missionary Ideologies through Narrative

This paper investigates the linguistic and interactional processes through which missionary students are socialized into ideologies of language learning and missionary work. Moreover, the paper illustrates how novices adapt those ideologies for their own purposes. I treat language socialization as an interactional process and achievement that involves both novice and expert as agents. Combining ethnography and discourse analysis, I focus on how the interactive nature of storytelling contributes to the socialization of language ideologies in a classroom for future missionaries. In so doing, I aim to illuminate the value of focusing on the activity of co-constructing narrative as a unit of analysis in language socialization research.

I discuss 1) the ways in which speakers’ narrative portrayals of themselves, their coparticipants, and absent characters are consequential to the process of language socialization; 2) how speakers use written texts in interpreting and assessing stories, thus demonstrating how the socializing influence of written texts can be revealed by talk-in-interaction; 3) how the professor implicitly socializes novices into particular ideologies by assessing, recasting, or building her own second-stories onto the students’ narratives; and 4) how novices in the missionary classroom actively employ new ideologies to reconcile lived experience with an ideal and unfolding view of self.

Kathe Managan, New York University
Diglossia Reconsidered: Language Choice and Code-Switching in Guadeloupean Voluntary Organizations

A central concern of the literature on Caribbean creoles has been the development of models to explain the distribution of linguistic codes. Most linguists have argued that it is most accurate to describe cases where French-lexified creoles are spoken along with their lexifier as stable diglossic situations, in contrast to those where English-lexified creoles are spoken along with their lexifier, which are described as creole continua marked by decreolization. Still, these categorizations remain a topic of discussion (e.g., Lefebvre, 1974; Meyjes, 1995; Prudent, 1981). In this paper I consider the applicability of the diglossia model (Ferguson, 1959) for describing patterns of language use in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. Guadeloupeans, all French citizens, are generally bilingual in French, the official language, and Kréyòl, a French-lexicon creole. For the present paper, I draw on 100 hours of audio- and videotaped data to explore how people in Guadeloupe use French and Kréyòl in their daily interactions and which model best describes their language use. As a further point, I consider whether or not Guadeloupe’s linguistic situation is best described as a stable one. In doing so, I will counter the argument of Meyjes (1995) that language shift is occurring in favor of French monolingualism.

Sarah S. Meacham, University of California, Los Angeles
Ideological Complexity, National Subjectivity, and the Cultures of English in Tokyo High Schools

I investigate the intersection of language ideology, educational practice, and identity within segments of English lessons in two different public high schools in Tokyo, Japan, one a technical high school, the other a liberal arts high school. This study explores the complexity of values concerning English language constructed during lessons. In lessons in both schools, a piece of text, the design of an activity, or a teacher’s elaboration will thematize explicitly a distance between English language and Japanese national subjectivity. However, at a different level of explicitness, utterances and words often display moments of simultaneity (Woolard, 1999), where words come to inhabit a kind of translinguistic space somewhere between English and Japanese. Differences in practices between the two schools construct different educational class identities.

Lev Michael, University of Texas at Austin
Between Grammar and Poetry: The Structure of Nanti Karintaa Chants

The structure of verbal art and the grammar of everyday speech have been argued to be intimately related by scholars from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. A major theme in this line of research is that poetic forms are generated by the artistic redeployment of linguistic resources already present in the grammar of a language (Jakobson, 1968; Sherzer, 1990; Tannen 1989). This paper evaluates and explores this claim by examining the poetic structure of a particular verbal art form in relation to the grammar of the language spoken by its performers. The verbal art form I examine is karintaa, an extemporaneously composed poetic form performed by the Nantis of the Peruvian Amazon. Focusing on the phenomenon of vowel lengthening in these chants, I compare this prosodic phenomenon with the grammaticalized prosodic structure of everyday Nanti speech. To make my comparison maximally explicit, I adopt an optimality theoretic framework in which I take extemporaneous karintaa to be outputs of a canonical optimality-theoretic constraint system that serves to force inputs (which are everyday utterances) to more closely match the prosodic structure of the refrain.

Noelle J. Molé, Rutgers University
Literacy Practice in the Piazza: An Analysis of Italian Graduation Scrolls

University commencement rituals inhabit Padua’s urban landscape, centering on the graduate’s reading from the papiro, or scroll, in front of friends and family. Scrolls include hypersexualized images of graduates and rhymed poems that recount their lives, particularly sexually explicit moments. I analyze graduation scrolls in both as a ritual and literacy shaping and shaped by gender and classed identities and understandings. How does this reading evoke various linguistic ideologies as scrolls are written in standard Italian, the regional Veneto dialect and English? I interrogate how this linguistic practice both challenges and reinforces existing understandings of gender, sex and class. I also focus on how the actions of graduates during the ritual, and the visual images on scrolls, confirm, and sometimes contradict, the written narrative. After an introduction to the history of scrolls in Padua, I analyze one man’s scroll with specific attention to embedded voices and code-switching between Veneto dialect and standardized Italian. Together with ethnographic details, close linguistic analysis, and a variety of theoretical insights, I undertake an analysis of this unique graduation ritual, carefully examining debasement, parody, and the reconstitution of social hierarchies.

Rae A. Moses and Giana D. Marelli, Northwestern University
Obituaries and the Discursive Construction of Dying and Living

Obituaries are perhaps the most frequently read section of the daily newspaper. They note the passing of friends and acquaintances, the famous and the infamous. They recount the life stories of ordinary people and people of power. These short essays also give us a glimpse into the shape and cultural interpretation of life and death. In this paper we examine a sample of obituaries drawn from The New York Times 1983-2002. The sample includes both those articles written by Times writers and the paid notices authored by family and friends. A text grammar is proposed based on Brown and Yule's (1983) discourse topic framework. The four parts of the text grammar are analyzed. We argue that the language of obituaries reveals important understandings of the beliefs our society holds about our lives and our deaths, especially with respect to the causes of death, life expectancy, and gender differences in our life stories. The textual analysis of obituaries offers an intriguing view of how we understand living and dying in our society today.

Janis B. Nuckolls, The University of Alabama
To Be or Not To Be Ideophonically Impoverished

This paper addresses a current debate over the universality of ideophones, a class of expressions that are used to simulate, through performative foregrounding, the salient processes and perceptions of everyday life experience. Using data from Quechua-speaking Runa in Amazonian Ecuador, I argue for a view of ideophones as a type of cultural discourse through which speakers align themselves with nonhuman life forms and forces of nature. This alignment is suggested by the special performative properties of ideophones, which collapse the distinction between a speech event and a narrated event, thus compelling a speaker to become an action, event, or process, in order to communicate about it. My argument finds support in Quechua data from a variety of discourse genres, including life history narratives, myths, and casual conversations. While there may be a universal tendency for all languages to develop ideophones, there are extralinguistic factors that can constrain or inhibit their emergence as a fully blown class of expressions with unique formal properties. Evidence for the importance of extralinguistic factors to ideophonic development or decay comes from comparative data on Zulu and Japanese ideophone usage, as well as the functionally restricted use of ideophones by speakers of English.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Baby, Darling, Honey!”: Constructing a Competence of English in South Korean TV Shows

This paper discusses how humorous use of English in South Korean TV comedy shows constructs a negative competence of English attributed to Koreans. In the TV shows analyzed, Koreans are depicted as unable to carry on a conversation in English, and only capable of using a markedly “bad English” which can be characterized by the use of stereotypical American English phrases and expressions that are clearly elementary, as well as hyper-Koreanized pronunciation of words. Together with the use of subtitling that does not presume a complex understanding of English, these practices contribute to a construction of a negative English competence for Koreans. This negative competence can be analyzed as an ideological construct, as it is treated as something that is shared among all Koreans.
I argue that this ideology of "Koreans as bad speakers of English" may lead Koreans to perceive their community as being subordinate to that of native English speakers, thus reproducing the cultural hegemony of English in the globalizing world (Pennycook, 1994, 1998). This suggests that, in contrast to Mock Spanish (Hill, 1993, 2001), construction of competence may also be used in a self-deprecative manner, causing a community of speakers to put themselves in a subordinate position in relation to other dominant communities.

Amy E. Peebles, University of Texas at Austin
It’s Not Coming Out, So Then What Is It? Sexual Identity and the Ex-Gay Narrative

In this paper, I analyze the personal narratives of “ex-gay” individuals who are attempting to transform their sexual identity in order to bring this identity in line with their understanding of evangelical Christian theology. Liang (1997) footnotes a distinction between “coming out stories,” i.e. narratives of realizing and accepting homosexual identity, and accounts of homosexuality given in ex-gay ministries; however, no sociolinguistic investigation of ex-gay narratives and their distinct differences has been published. Here I examine ex-gay narratives and compare the language and identity issues they present with research on coming-out stories.
Based on the analysis of 20 hours of data from ten ethnographic “life history” interviews (5 males and 5 females), I found that ex-gay narratives reveal a plot-initial tension similar to coming-out stories in the recognition and self-naming of homosexual identity. However, within ex-gay narratives, religious discourse about homosexuality creates an inter-textual identity conflict and leads them to begin a complex process of re-naming and acquiring new discourse. Ex-gay narratives provide a significant opportunity to observe individuals using language as the primary tool to not only express identity but also create and transform it. My analysis of these narratives also reveals how individuals’ identities and discourse replicate and are constrained by religious Discourse.