Texas Linguistics Forum Vol. 50 (2006)

Vicki Michael Anderson
Complexity and the Distinctiveness Criterion: An Argument in Support of Bidialectalism among Speakers of Pennsylvania Dutchified English / South Central Pennsylvania Regional Standard English

While the issue of whether any speaker can be a genuine bidialectal remains controversial, it is nonetheless true that speakers exist who maintain two "ways of speaking" that correspond to dialects to which they are exposed. One argument against the bidialectal status of such speakers is skepticism that their "ways of speaking" are distinct enough from each other to be classified as separate dialects. This does not seem to be the case, however, for a set of speakers in south central Pennsylvania whose two "ways of speaking" correspond to Pennsylvania Dutchified English (PDE) and to a regional standard of English, both dialects these speakers have been in contact with since childhood. This paper presents evidence for the use of low-level, complex rules which guide the separation between the "PDE mode" and "standard English mode" of these potential bidialectals and argues, on that basis, that these speakers do indeed exhibit native mastery of two dialects and thus fulfill the distinctiveness criterion for bidialectalism.

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Mary Antonia Andronis
"Hallalla Radio Haelli!": Language Revitalization, Ideology and Shift in Salasaca, Ecuador

This work examines language ideologies with respect to language shift, standardization and ethnolinguistic identity within the Quichua-speaking community of Salasaca, Ecuador. Language ideologies frequently being a reflection of the inherent social structure in a speech community (Silverstein 1979), this research investigates the role that ideology plays in speakers' ethnolinguistic identities, and how it can affect the process and progress of language standardization, revitalization and shift. In addition to the analysis of interviews, metalinguistic and other natural language discourse, the primary locus of data for this research is the locally-established and community-run radio station in Salasaca, Radio Haelli. This analysis explicates the ways in which Salasaca Quichua speakers both maintain and mediate their own ethnolinguistic identities, while simultaneously endorsing a nationally-standardized Quichua language movement, through both radio and interpersonal discourse.

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James Bielo
Recontextualizing the Bible in Small Group Discourse

This paper contributes to research on recontextualizing discourse, particularly in religious language. I observe this phenomenon in group Bible study, a key discourse site for US Protestants. I argue that recontextualizations of the Bible in group discourse provide a meta-commentary for interpreting scripture. Differences in recontextualization are traced to differing assumptions about the Bible, and thus distinct interpretive ideologies for Biblical exegesis. This is demonstrated in two men's Bible studies, one United Methodist and one Missouri Synod Lutheran. In the former, recontextualizations embed interpretations that display an eagerness for connecting the Bible to contemporary issues; even if that relevance means straying from the original textual meaning. In the Lutheran case, recontextualizations attempt to preserve the text's literary and historical context. These differing intertextualities also help create distinct interactive frames. In the former, multiple interpretations are allowed to co-exist. In the latter, the group is constantly constructing a hermeneutic method.

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Markus Bieswanger
2 abbrevi8 or Not 2 abbrevi8: A Contrastive Analysis of Different Space- and Time-Saving Strategies in English and German Text Messages

According to media and industry reports, the popularity of SMS (short text messaging on cellular phones) has been experiencing enormous growth since texting was launched commercially in 1995 and will most likely increase even further in the years to come, particularly in the US. Nevertheless, the linguistic properties of text messaging have hitherto only received comparatively little attention. So far, most studies have analyzed SMS with respect to one language only and many scholars have made generalizations about the properties of so-called "texting language" or "Textspeak" that do not hold true when being applied to other languages. The length of text messages is limited to 160 characters. This paper analyzes the different means employed to shorten text messages and argues that the space- and time- saving strategies used in English and German differ structurally and by frequency. The paper thus addresses a desideratum in computer-mediated communication (CMC) research and sets the scene for future studies concerning space- and time-saving texting strategies across languages.

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Sabrina Billings
Speaking Beauties: Linguistic Ideologies in Tanzanian Beauty Pageants

This paper explores language ideologies in the context of Tanzanian beauty pageants through analysis of the speech of contestants. In Tanzania, where Swahili serves as a lingua franca, but where over 120 ethnic languages are spoken and English is embraced as an elite world language, beauty pageants offer a site where ideologies about language emerge. In these events, contestants' language use is a focus of explicit attention and critique, as well as more implicit judgment. Findings highlight the fact that, through various semiotic processes, local ethnic languages are virtually invisible in these public contexts and that, despite discourses to the contrary, contestants' use of English rather than Swahili seriously increases their chances for victory. Conclusions articulate the real-life consequences of linguistic ideologies, showing that they play an important role in processes of language shift, as well as in the success of would-be beauty queens.

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Steven Black
Creativity, Choice, and Culture: Communicating Creativity in Small Jazz Ensembles

edu In this paper I analyze communication in jazz music rehearsals, focusing specifically on talk about improvisation and interplay. Jazz is a musical art form that places a high value on improvisational creativity. Popular wisdom suggests that creativity cannot be taught, that you either 'have it' or you don't, so when jazz is placed in the classroom, there is a unique opportunity to learn something about the possibility of teaching students how to be creative. My participant-observation of jazz rehearsals and analysis video-recorded rehearsals reveals that instructors display a noticeable preference for avoiding discussion of the specifics of collaborative improvisation. Still, I argue, key information is subtly communicated through the pragmatics of instructors' utterances. I document a disjuncture between the pragmatics and metapragmatics of communication in jazz rehearsals, and explain how this tension allows instructors to communicate some of the prerequisites of jazz performance while still providing students with opportunities for creative musical interplay.

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Clay Butler
From Bite to Nip: The Dialogic Construction of Teases

This paper discusses the dialogic nature of teases. A tease is on the surface a criticism, or derogatory comment, that is understood to be playful in context. The dataset for this study is based on a video recording of four young men playing poker and the constant teasing that ensues. The study confirms a point noted in earlier research (Drew, 1987; Tholander & Aronsson, 2002, for example) that the nature of a potential tease is in part determined by the way it is received. After discussing the various types of responses to teases, several examples will be analyzed with a particular focus on how the teases are used in masculine discourse to serve group alignment, initiation, and identity goals. One conclusion made is that the young men being analyzed seem to enjoy and find useful in their larger communicative goals the inherent ambiguity in teases; they often give teases with minimal contextualization cues that normally would signal their intention as playful.

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Brahim Chakrani
Rethinking Linguistic Power and Solidarity: Covert Language Attitudes in Morocco

This paper presents empirical evidence that challenges the orthodox understanding of language attitudes in Morocco, especially with regard to the two high varieties: Standard Arabic (SA) and French. These two varieties have been standardly analyzed as being in functional complementarity: SA is analyzed as "integrative", representing local culture and social solidarity whereas French is portrayed as status-bearing, representing modernity and social mobility.

I will present the results of matched guise test (MGT) and a questionnaire to argue that status and solidarity traits are contested in both languages and cannot be allocated exclusively to either. The MGT reveals a complex attitudinal landscape of a rapidly changing linguistic market that is characterized by multiple tensions, where multiple ideologies are constantly negotiating and policing the availability of their authorizing codes in different functional domains of use.

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Erin Debenport
"Listen So You Can Live Life the Way It's Supposed to be Lived": Secrecy, Circumlocution and Dictionary Creation at a New Mexico Pueblo

Community members at a New Mexico Pueblo involved in dictionary design creatively circumvent the current debate regarding the appropriate means of transmitting linguistic and cultural knowledge by embedding information regarding local practices and condensed examples of traditional speech genres within the document's example sentences. This paper will analyze the choice of illustrative material in a Pueblo dictionary, focusing on four central areas of inquiry: how extant and emergent language ideologies engender indirect methods of encoding salient cultural knowledge, how this approach to lemmatization compares to methods used in other dictionary projects, how example sentences reflect adumbrated versions of established speech genres in the language, and, drawing on Silverstein's work detailing the encoding of "cultural concepts" in language, how semiotic processes involved in the inclusion of cultural knowledge function within such forms.

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Lisa Del Torto
Bridging a Gap: Language Brokering Within Three-Generational Italian-English Bilingual Families

This paper explores interpreting in three-generational Italian-English bilingual families as a complex language brokering activity. Second-generation members have served as interpreters for their parents in institutional contexts since they migrated as children over fifty years ago. They extend this practice to the family context, brokering between first- and third-generation family members in two ways. Solicited interpreting occurs when speakers verbally request clarification or when second-generation members perceive conversational sequence problems. Unsolicited interpreting is neither requested nor sequentially triggered. Second-generation members report acting to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps between their Italian-dominant immigrant parents and their English-dominant Canadian/US-born children. Interpreting in multi-generational conversations is one way through which this bridging role is (re)constructed. In the language shift process, the middle generation serves as a cultural and linguistic broker within the family just as they do between family and outsiders.

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Michael Gradoville & Evelyn Durán Urrea
Variation in the Future Tense of New Mexican Spanish

The predominance of the periphrastic future in Latin American Spanish has been extensively studied, due to the fact that the extension of its use is in the process of replacing the morphological future. It has been found that at present MF frequently is used as a modal marker to express doubt instead of marking future and PF is assigned to futurity. In this project we combine the variationist perspective with a functional analysis to investigate if the same extension of PF found in other varieties is occurring in New Mexican Spanish. New Mexican Spanish allows us to discover the effects of language contact in the extension of PF.

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Kira Hall
Verbal Extremities: Transitions of Sex, Class, and Language in New Delhi

This paper examines the role of sexuality in the use of Hindi and English in northern India, focusing on an NGO in New Delhi that has as its mandate the distribution of HIV/AIDS education and sexual information to the public. In particular, I discuss the ways in which women associated with sexual alterity, specifically those who identify as either "boys" (an eroticized transgender identity) or "lesbians" (an identity more closely allied with same-sex desire as articulated in Europe and the United States), engage with global and national discourses that legitimate English as the language of modernity and Hindi as the language of tradition. Because Hindu nationalism has become increasingly associated with the Hindi language, employees within this NGO tend to view Hindi as an oppressive medium for the expression of both sexual practice and sexual identity, rejecting traditionalist assumptions regarding the position of Hindi in the contemporary nation-state. Middle class women who participate in NGO activities, aspiring to a class symbolic that opposes the perceived conservative understanding of sexuality voiced in traditional India, socialize newcomers away from their transsexual imaginings in part by offering them English as a new medium for talking about sex. The paper thus highlights the ways in which progressive NGO discourses of sexual identity, here carried through globalized forms of English, produce differential effects on distinct class-based sexualities.

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John Haviland
Harangues and Exhortations

Much of the large literature on parallelism and "ritual speech" in Mesoamerica and beyond has concentrated either on the poetic structure of the genres or on the striking semantic imagery involved. I will return to a topic I first approached ethnographically in a paper at a conference in Austin about 20 years ago--Zinacantec diphrasism and "ritual speech" in "non-ritual" contexts--to consider instead the interactive effects of Tzotzil parallel genres in two more or less extemporized contexts: wedding exhortations where new couples are verbally enveloped in a marital creed by elders, and extemporized semi-drunken harangues that echo and parody such exhortations in other circumstances. The theme is the indexical interplay between genre, participant, and activity, where linguistic form mediates distinct but simultaneous layers of action and social structure.

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Susan Herring
Linguistic Perspectives on Persistent Conversation: Towards a Morphology of Instant Messaging

Casual spoken conversation tends to be highly variable, exhibiting limited structure at the global, schematic level. Text-based Instant Messaging (IM) exchanges resemble prototypical casual conversation: they are synchronous, dyadic, and frequently engaged in for phatic purposes. However, in contrast to spoken conversations, IM conversations leave a persistent trace, which allows them to be tracked and reviewed. This talk adapts principles of conversation analysis and exchange structure analysis to Instant Messaging. Specifically, it addresses the question: Do IM conversations have predictable schematic structure?

The data are a corpus of 200 IM conversations produced by undergraduate students at Indiana University. A visualization tool, VisualDTA (Kurtz & Herring 2004), is used to display the results of the analysis. In this talk, I focus on identifying abstract units of conversation that emerge using VisualDTA: meaningful chunks of structure, such as 'greeting sequence', 'topic drift', and 'digression', that combine to form longer conversations. These findings expand and support the observation of Ford (2003) that synchronous computer-mediated chat is more routinized than comparable face-to-face interaction.

I conclude by proposing explanations for why Instant Messaging should be predictably structured, including the leanness of the text-only medium, which filters out potentially distracting social cues; its written, persistent nature; and the fact that young people typically engage in IM exchanges simultaneous with other activities, reducing the attentional resources available for producing and processing IM messages.

Ford, C. (2003). An Exploratory Study of the Differences between Face-To-Face and Computer-Mediated Reference Interactions. Doctoral Dissertation, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington.

Kurtz, A. J., & Herring, S. C. (2004). VisualDTA. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~ajkurtz/research/VisualDTA/

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Uri Horesh
Contact-induced Change in Progress: Palestinian Arabic Spoken in Israel

Palestinian Arabic Spoken in Israel (PASII) exhibits lenition of several phonological features of Arabic. We focus on two variables:

- weakening of the voiced pharyngeal fricative
- weakening of secondary pharyngealization of "emphatic" coronals

A corpus of urban Palestinian Arabic is used to verify and analyze these processes. All speakers examined are of Muslim origin; they are stratified by gender, socioeconomic status, education, age, and community. Some of these indicate correlation with degree of bilingualism and language contact. Most speakers are from a town in Israel, and a smaller control group is from the urban West Bank.

These phenomena may be analyzed as changes in progress, because their results resemble features of Israeli Hebrew, with which PASII is in contact, varying by age. We will report on an acoustic analysis of the data, on the statistical significance of linguistic and social factors, and explain the results in light of PASII being a language closely in contact with Hebrew, while also being a variety of Arabic used alongside a standard in a diglossic context.

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Given Lee & Jana Cossairt
Language at Play: Code-Switching, Identity Negotiation, and Socialization of Seven High School and College Students of Korean Heritage in the United States

Within the social psychological frame of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) developed by Giles and colleagues (1984, 2001, 2004), code-choice functions as a strategy of convergence or divergence available to bilingual speakers. The study explores code-switching, identity negotiation, and socialization in a recreational setting of seven high school and college students of Korean heritage currently living in the U.S. Data sources are interviews, combined with audio-tapings and observations of these students' weekly basketball games. Data analysis demonstrates that for these students, Korean serves as the most salient marker of in-group membership. However, code-switching occurs in inter-group contexts to accommodate non-Korean speakers and in intra-group contexts to facilitate communication and negotiate interpersonal interactions. The participants' language use and attitudes toward Korean and English reflect a negotiated ethnic identity in which bilingualism plays a central role, allowing both a differentiation from and an integration into the larger mainstream U.S. culture.

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Daniel Lefkowitz
Speech Semiotics, Accent Authenticity, and Voice in Hollywood Cinema

This paper develops a theoretical basis for critiquing 'voice' in public culture. The project grows out of sociolinguistic work on the role of dialectal variation in cultural struggles over identity and power, understanding public discourse as an articulation of the hegemonic and the resistant possibilities of speech. Despite sociolinguistic attention to the role of standard and non-standard language in public discourse and the huge literature on film, few researchers have looked at the meaning of speech form in cinema. This paper looks at Hollywood's representation of Native American voices to argue for a concept of 'faux language' that captures the range of sociolinguistic effects speech has in film. Combining the sociolinguist's attention to linguistic detail with the interpretive anthropologist's attention to the broader social and semiotic context within which these images/symbols are read and consumed, this multi-layered approach to discourse analysis provides clues for unpacking the inherently ambivalent messages of public discourse in general.

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Lev Michael
The Moral Implications of Evidentiality in Nanti society: Epistemic Distance as a Pragmatic Metaphor for Moral Responsibility

This paper examines the use of evidentiality as a means of negotiating and constructing moral responsibility in the context of communicative interactions between Nantis, an Arawakan people of Peruvian Amazonia. I claim that epistemic distance, as encoded by different evidential strategies (e.g. direct experience vs. hearsay), functions as a pragmatic metaphor for moral responsibility in Nanti discourse. By emphasizing epistemic distance through the use of particular evidential strategies, Nantis can construct themselves as distant from a given set of circumstances, and thereby avoid the social assignment of culpability. This talk is based on the close examination of transcripts of interactions among Nanti individuals that I recorded between 2003 and 2005, supplemented by systematic ethnographic observation.

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Sadaf Munshi
Contact-induced Change in J & K Burushaski

This paper presents a description and analysis of contact-induced change in a sub-dialect of Burushaski (JKB), spoken in Jammu & Kashmir, India. JKB has been in isolation from the mainstream Burushaski community in Pakistan for 115 years and has developed divergent linguistic features. Many of these features can be explained in terms of contact. The study has been done from a text-and-discourse-centered approach. The database consists of digitally recorded natural conversations, stories, narratives, elicited words, sentences and field notes.

Most sociolinguistic studies on Burushaski are fairly recent and not many deal with language contact and contact-induced change in detail. The language has been greatly influenced by neighboring languages. Pakistan varieties of Burushaski are surrounded and influenced by Indo-European, Tibeto-Burman, and Altaic languages. JKB is in contact with Indo-Aryan (Urdu and Kashmiri). My analyses cover various linguistic consequences of contact in JKB, viz., borrowing, innovation, restructuring and simplification of linguistic features.

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Antje Muntendam
Diglossia, Footing, and Quechua-Spanish Code-switching

In this paper I will present empirical evidence from code-switching in Quechua-Spanish to argue that switching between the two codes enables a diglossic performance in the two languages; Spanish indexing a (H), power/status, function and Quechua indexing a (L), solidarity, function. The functional alignment of this diglossic use is accompanied, and complicated, by a change in footing; however, the switching from Quechua to Spanish is only guaranteed if and only if the text in context introduces the variable of power, understood in terms of asymmetrical relations between actors or salience/importance of the message. This analysis is based on data from traditional stories and personal narratives which form part of a corpus collected by Urioste in Cochabamba (Bolivia). The matrix language in these narratives is Quechua, and the embedded language is Spanish. The switches from Quechua to Spanish in these narratives are both intra- and intersentential. However, for this study I restrict the discussion to intersentential code-switching.

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Laura Felton Rosulek
The Representation of Social Actors in Oppositional Discourses: Closing Arguments in Criminal Trials

This paper analyzes the closing arguments of criminal trials in the United States to present a systematic understanding of the sociolinguistic mechanisms that underlie the discursive representation of social actors and events involved in these cases. The research question that guides our investigation is: What are the different sociolinguistic methods and linguistic tools used by trial lawyers-prosecution and defense-who take the same event, the same defendant and victim(s), the same evidence and witnesses, and yet create two opposing discourses. I will present evidence from three cases; a murder, a sexual abuse, and a controlled substance case, to claim, following van Leeuwen (2002), that lawyers systematically manipulate the linguistic terms they use to refer to the defendant and the victim(s) of a case to try to control the role these people play in the jury's mental representation of the crime.

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Sharon Stoerger, Inna Kouper & Susan Herring
"Great job, Quester!" Assessing Language Skills on Quest Atlantis | Indiana University sstoerge@indiana.edu

This study analyzed written learning tasks called 'quests' in Quest Atlantis, a 3-D multi-user educational environment designed for children aged 9-12. The quests were reviewed by a classroom teacher ('teacher'), other students in the class ('class'), or any student participating in Quest Atlantis ('community'). A semi-random sample of 112 quests and 217 reviews was analyzed for language complexity and standardness, controlling for gender and the difficulty of the quest. The findings reveal gender differences in the types of quests and reviews submitted, as well as in language complexity and standardness. Overall, females used more standard language, but males submitted quests of greater difficulty, and more community quest reviews than did females. We propose an interpretation of these findings in terms of developmental differences, which favor girls, and gender differences in socialization, which favor boys. Boys interpreted the environment as more 'game-like' than did girls.

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Thea R. Strand
"Kebab" and "Knot": Identity and Legitimacy in Ideologies of Linguistic Appropriation in Norway

This paper compares popular language ideologies surrounding two surface-similar cases of linguistic borrowing and mixing in Norway, "Kebab Norwegian" and "knot". Both of these involve the use of distinctive linguistic forms by non-native speakers: "Kebab Norwegian" incorporates words from a variety of non-European immigrant languages (e.g., Arabic, Kurdish, Urdu), while "knot" is the use of local or regional Norwegian dialects by speakers without perceived legitimate access. In this paper "Kebab Norwegian" is considered as innovative social and linguistic practice in light of recent research on similar practices among urban youth elsewhere in Europe, as well as in relation to recent work on linguistic appropriation. Comparisons are made between attitudes toward and ideological interpretations of "Kebab Norwegian" and "knot," especially as they relate to issues of identity, authenticity, and legitimacy of speakers. In addition, some of the historical and political circumstances contributing to the development of these two differentially-valued sociolinguistic phenomena are addressed.

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Chantal Tetreault
Peer Group Communication at the Onset of Adulthood: Algerian Youth in France

The study of adolescence in language and culture research has undergone a profound transformation: the peer group has replaced adulthood as the standard by which to measure teen culture. This shift has resulted in considerable scholarship on how peer groups influence communicative practices during adolescence. Yet relatively little is known about how peer communication contributes to the shift from adolescence to adulthood. This paper analyzes communicative practices among older female teens (17-18) to observe the influence of the peer group at the onset of adulthood. I argue that although the peer group is central to encouraging transgressive verbal styles during early adolescence (13-16), it is also central to exerting social pressure on girls to abandon these styles as they move into adulthood. This paper contributes to the comparative study of peer groups and communication at the onset of adulthood.

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Anja Vogel
Constructing a German Identity: Analyzing Language Socialization Processes Through Greeting Practices in Post-unification Berlin High Schools

This paper examines Germany's transitional period from a suppressive political system to a democratic one by analyzing Berlin classroom greetings, which represent instances of rapid shifts in language socialization practices in formerly divided Germany's educational settings over historical time. The paper addresses the effects of these political changes on novices', i.e. students', national identity formation processes. Analysis reveals that language socialization practices today are very much alike in former East and West Berlin and similar to the previous informal Western standards. Moreover, these collaboratively and consistently enacted teacher-student practices reinforce understandings of what it means to be a German student as well as a German citizen. Rather than identify with the traditional German ideals of love for order, discipline, and obedience, students today learn to identify themselves as independent and self-determining.

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Qing Zhang
"Jiang Shopping Jinxing Daodi": Linguistic Innovation in a Chinese Television Program

Over the past three decades, China has been undergoing the transition from a state planned economy to an increasingly globalized market economy. The unprecedented socioeconomic changes have left their impact on Putonghua, the standard variety of Mandarin in Mainland China. My previous research has shown that linguistic innovation does not simply reflect social change but can be used to effect new social distinctions (Zhang 2005). In this study, I examine the linguistic practice of two hosts of a television shopping program and extend the investigation of linguistic innovation to include phonological, lexical, and grammatical features. The television program, "S-Information Station," promotes a new cosmopolitan middle-class lifestyle through consumption. The study shows that the two hosts use a range of innovative features to construct a "cosmopolitan Mandarin style." They draw on linguistic resources from Putonghua, non-Mainland Mandarin varieties, particularly Taiwan Mandarin, and English. In contrast to the state-sanctioned Putonghua which is a regional (i.e., Mainland China) variety, the cosmopolitan style of Mandarin is distinctively non-conventional and non-local. The new style is indexical and iconic of the trendy and cosmopolitan persona presented by the hosts. The study proposes that the wide circulation of the new Mandarin style in the broadcasting media reinforces and reproduces the association between the new style and a set of media and social personae that display characterological attributes of being glamorous, cosmopolitan, cool, trendy, and not-traditional. Thus, mass media plays a significant role in the "enregisterment" (Agha 2003) of the new cosmopolitan style by valorizing the characterological attributes mentioned above. Despite the "Common Language Law" which decrees that the broadcasting media adhere to the norms of Putonghua, programs such as "S-Information Station" have become a driving force in the propagation of linguistic innovation in Mainland China.

Anthony K. Webster
Code-Switching in Navajo Orthographic Poetry: On Places, the Mythic, and Mythic Places