Introductory Linguistics A draft textbook by Bruce P. Hayes
Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2010 7:07 am
Chapter 3: Normative views of language
1.
Introduction
Suppose we are eliciting some data on English morphology from one particular speaker of English, and obtain the following:
Present Past participle
I jump. I have jumped.
I place it. I have placed it.
I allow it. I have allowed it.
I grow it. I have grown it.
I cling to the branch. I have clung to the branch.
I string the racket. I have strung the racket.
I bring it with me. I have brung it with me.
The last form would, if I were collecting it from a UCLA undergraduate, startle me, but in fact there are many dialects of English in which the past participle of bring is brung.
This is an example of a normative belief — on my part, and perhaps for you as well. Somewhere, deep inside me, I feel that people ought to say brought as the past participle of bring, and that brung is “wrong.” A normative belief involves “ought to be”, as opposed to “is”.
Normative beliefs can be about some particular word or construction, or about whole languages or dialects. Here are examples of both kinds.
•
“French has a more beautiful sound than German.”
•
“It is better to say ‘it is I’ than ‘it is me’”
•
“[Such and such an ethnic group ] speakers a substandard dialect of the language”
•
“Southern accents sound {friendly/ignorant and uneducated}.”
Here, of course, our interest in language is entirely scientific; we aren’t going to wallow in our normative beliefs, but try to come to terms with them as an object of study. The questions at hand are:
•
What might we do as linguistic scientists to make sure that our work remains objective in the face of normative beliefs?
•
How do we find out about normative beliefs and assess them?
•
Where do normative beliefs come from? Why do they arise?
•
Are normative beliefs ever “justified” in a factual sense?
1.1
The professional practice of linguists concerning normative beliefs
First, normative beliefs arise for linguists as a methodological issue. We want to do good science, and it’s quite likely that our normative beliefs might impede our scientific objectivity.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 43
My own favorite metaphor for this is the clean white lab coat—the emblem that a laboratory scientist wants to keep the samples clean and uncontaminated. As linguists, we keep our lab coats clean (in part) by ignoring what we feel about language, and concentrating on the data.
Scientific objectivity is of course a goal that cannot always be attained. Everyone, including experienced linguists, has normative beliefs, and we can’t really make them go away. To speak personally on this point: I find that whenever I encounter a phrase like “very unique,” or the pronunciation [»nukjulr] for nuclear, I experience a certain feeling of indignation. Both cases are instances where the normative belief is one that favors the older meaning or pronunciation. I will continue to feel this way for the foreseeable future. But as a scholar I know there is nothing inherently wrong with them, and when I am doing linguistics I can try to factor out my feelings from my thoughts and analysis.
This has various consequences for how linguistics is conducted. First, linguists tend to use carefully-selected vocabulary that shows that, for professional purposes, they are not buying into the beliefs that are held by (many of) the speakers of the language being investigated. For instance, a linguist would be likely to use the term “nonstandard” rather than “substandard.”
Second, the culture of the field seems generally aware that there is a need to be vigilant about normative beliefs. I believe that if a linguist let slip a blatant normative belief in a lecture at the annual Linguistic Society of America, there would later be quite a bit of smirking and mockery in the hotel bar…
Lastly, normative beliefs are not just “factored out” where appropriate, but made into a object of study: where do they come from? are they ever rational? why are often they so intense? Some discussion of these questions follows below.
1.2
Investigating normative beliefs
To learn about normative beliefs, a good starting point is simply to attend to what people say about language. For instance, the “Cockney” dialect of English is that historically spoken by poor and working-class people in poorer neighborhoods of London. It is fairly familiar to Americans because we hear it in mouths of fictional characters of these background in film and drama. Here is a reported opinion of Cockney from about a century ago:
‘inspectors and teachers of English in London elementary schools who met in conference in 1906 declared that “The Cockney [London lower-class] mode of speech, with its unpleasant twang, is a modern corruption without legitimate credentials, and is unworthy of being the speech of any person in the capital city of the Empire.’17
The description may surprise us, since the Cockney we hear is sentimentalized; usually placed in the mouths of characters who are uneducated but have a heart of gold.
17 Source: Does Accent Matter? (1989) by John Honey.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 44
All over the world, there are dialects that are considered (by many people) to be prestigious and dialects that are considered (by many people) to be non-prestigious (of which Cockney is one example). The non-prestigious dialects are spoken on various bases:
•
Social class, as in Cockney.
•
Minority ethnicity, as in the German-influenced varieties of English spoken in North Dakota and neighboring states, or African-American English Vernacular (Black English).
•
Geography: the varieties of Korean spoken outside Seoul, and the varieties of Japanese spoken outside Tokyo, tend to be stigmatized.
To some degree, you can get an idea of the prestige of varieties of language just by asking people, but social psychologists have tried to be more systematic about it. A favored research method is the so-called matched-guise experiment:18 you find a perfect bilingual or bidialectal, and have them say (more or less) the same thing in both of the language varieties in question. You also mix in many other voices, so that, if all goes well, the experimental subjects who listen to the recording aren’t aware that one person is speaking twice. The subject are asked to rate the speakers on various scales, for instance:
•
intelligence
•
suitability for employment
•
trustability
•
likelihood to be a friend
The measurement of interest concerns how these ratings differ for the recordings of the same speaker saying (essentially) the same thing in two languages or dialects.
By now, dozens of matched-guise experiments have been carried out around the world. Generally, they show what you might expect: that speakers of prestigious dialects are judged as more intelligent and suited to positions of responsibility. For the more intimate criteria of trustability and friendliness, the less prestigious variety sometimes wins, but quite often the more prestigious variety does. Often enough, prestigious varieties are preferred even by the native speakers of the non-prestigious variety.
This is what such experiments teach us. However, they are limited in their scope - a formal experimental setting might well bias the subjects’ responses. A more nuanced view would be that there are different kinds of prestige. Nonstandard varieties are valued, at least by their speakers, as badges of community membership, and members of a community with a non-standard dialect who speak the standard dialect to their peers are “sending a message” that might not be particularly desirable to be sending.
Educators, particularly of young children, often have an extremely delicate task: they judge that teaching a standard variety to non-standard speakers will help their students with their lives and careers, but the tacit message “your dialect is inferior” that may come with this training is not a very nice—or, as we will see, valid—message to give to kids. Enlightened educators try to
18 A good review is in Ralph Fasold (1984) The Sociolinguistics of Society, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Chapter 6.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 45
steer a course between the need to teach a standard, and the need not to alienate their students when teaching the standard.
1.3
The origin of normative beliefs
Why do people have normative beliefs about language? This question is in need of further study, but it seems reasonable to point out two possible sources.
1.3.1
Societal division
Many normative beliefs seem to stem from the divisions found in a society. I don’t think it is controversial to say that every society is in a state of conflict, ranging from mild to extreme. The divisions can be ethnic, economic, or geographic. In general, the varieties of language that are affiliated with power will be the more prestigious ones. This includes varieties spoken by wealthier and better-educated people; the varieties spoken in the capital city of a country; and the varieties spoken by the politically dominant ethnicity. Putting this more crudely, people on top of the heap often find it easy to despise the language spoken by people lower down.
An interesting comparison of this sort can be made when the very same language has different status in different locations. French has an exalted status in France, where it is the dominant language, but until recent decades it had had low status in Quebec, where the ethnic minority that spoke it was economically dominated by English speakers. German once had very high status in Latvia, where it was the language of an economically dominant foreign-based minority. German was less prestigious in 19th century America, where it was widely spoken but gradually abandoned by its speakers in favor of English.
1.3.2
Linguistic conservatism
A rather different, and less political, source of normative beliefs results from the ever-present process of language change. Typically, speakers will feel that the older forms of a language are inherently “correct” and that the innovating forms are wrong. For example, “it is I” is the older form; “it is me” is an innovation. Putting the accent on the first syllable of compensate and confiscate was considered pretty vulgar in the 18th century, since at that time many people still used the old pronunciation with the accent on the second syllable.
1.3.3
Are normative beliefs ever justified?
Let us now take on the most loaded question about normative beliefs: is it really true that one language or dialect legitimately be called inferior to another?
It seems unlikely to me that any language could be significantly simpler than any other. The reason I believe this is that field workers who go to work on a language never believe that they’re done. A responsible and accurate reference grammar of a language will go on for hundreds of pages, and still be giving just a rough outline of many areas. The languages for which the only grammars are thin ones are the languages that haven’t been studied much. What we know about English would probably fill a large bookshelf. There’s little reason to doubt that the same would hold of any other language that was submitted to the same intensity of study.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 46
Often, grammatical issues in a particular language are subtle or complex, and thus difficult for the linguist to establish confidently. This holds true just as much for languages spoken by peoples with simple material culture as for languages spoke in large, industrialized countries.
A related point is that all languages seem to be about equally expressive: roughly speaking, whatever can be thought, can be said in any language; though the degree of effort needed might vary in certain cases.
This claim is probably true for dialects as well. A famous article by the linguist William Labov, “The Logic of Nonstandard English,”19 made a case for the grammatical integrity of Black English as a system (a well known fact about the dialect is that it has distinctions of verbal tense not available in the standard), and also for the distinction between being a speaker of a prestigious dialect and being an articulate speaker (there are both articulate and inarticulate speakers of both prestigious and nonprestigious dialects).
Naturally, languages differ greatly in vocabulary. A language will normally include a vocabulary suitable for the culture within which it is spoken; and indeed, experience suggests that it is not at all easy just to take a random language “off the shelf” and adapt it instantly to the needs of an industrialized society. But this seems to be a rather superficial difference, as with time languages can acquire new vocabulary (through borrowing and derivational morphology) to accommodate any culturally-novel concept.
Languages also differ in their morphological complexity. But it would be a mistake to equate morphology with complexity. In English, for instance, the inflectional morphology is very simple, but the choice of articles (the vs. a) is a monstrously complex and difficult topic; it just happens to be a problem in syntax and semantics, not morphology.
Earlier in this text I very tentatively suggested that there may be some virtue in inflectionally-impoverished languages like Chinese, which don’t force their speakers to make commitments they don’t want or need to make. Yet as a native speaker of a mildly inflectional language, I feel it is implausible that the inflectional choices of English are somehow hampering my ability to communicate, and I’m sure that native speakers of heavily inflected languages like Turkish or Finnish would feel the same.
1.3.4
Putative cases of “illogicality” in language
It is sometimes said that stigmatized languages or dialects are “illogical.” For example, in many dialects of English (including Black English), the sentence corresponding to standard English “You don’t know anything” is “You don’t know nothing”. Some people believe that this makes the non-standard dialects “illogical”, in that they are “really saying” something they don’t mean, namely “it is not the case that you know nothing.”
The absurdity of this is revealed by looking at other, non-stigmatized languages, which do the same thing without being looked down upon. For example, in French “You don’t know anything” would be translated as “Tu ne sais rien”, literally “You not know nothing.”
19 In his book Language and the Inner City (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1974).
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 47
In fact, in non-standard English dialects, “You don’t know nothing” is completely clear and unambiguous. The way one would say “It is not the case that you know nothing” would be “You don’t know nothing”, with a heavy accent placed on nothing. There is no possibility for confusion.
The “illogicality” accusation is based on a fundamental analytic error, that of analyzing other languages or dialects from the viewpoint of one’s own language or dialect. Every language and dialect has a grammar, which to be understood has to be studied in its own terms.
I conclude that at present there seems to be very little justification for any claims that one language or dialect is superior to another. Naturally, since I have my “white lab coat” on (see above), I would not want to exclude the possibility that such justification could be discovered in the future, but this is at present a hypothetical possibility.
1.4
Summary: normative beliefs.
Summing up: normative beliefs about languages and dialects are found everywhere. They can be measured in matched-guise experiments, and typically are a reflection of the hierarchy and conflicts (economic, ethnic, geographic) within a society. With regard to particular grammatical constructions, words, and pronunciations within a single dialect, normative beliefs usually involve adherence to slightly archaic variants, that is to say, resistance to change.
Linguists, aspiring to be scientists,seek to be aware of their own normative beliefs, in order to be able to guard against bias.A number of scholars are actively interested in the nature and causes of normative beliefs and examine them as a research topic.
1.
Introduction
Suppose we are eliciting some data on English morphology from one particular speaker of English, and obtain the following:
Present Past participle
I jump. I have jumped.
I place it. I have placed it.
I allow it. I have allowed it.
I grow it. I have grown it.
I cling to the branch. I have clung to the branch.
I string the racket. I have strung the racket.
I bring it with me. I have brung it with me.
The last form would, if I were collecting it from a UCLA undergraduate, startle me, but in fact there are many dialects of English in which the past participle of bring is brung.
This is an example of a normative belief — on my part, and perhaps for you as well. Somewhere, deep inside me, I feel that people ought to say brought as the past participle of bring, and that brung is “wrong.” A normative belief involves “ought to be”, as opposed to “is”.
Normative beliefs can be about some particular word or construction, or about whole languages or dialects. Here are examples of both kinds.
•
“French has a more beautiful sound than German.”
•
“It is better to say ‘it is I’ than ‘it is me’”
•
“[Such and such an ethnic group ] speakers a substandard dialect of the language”
•
“Southern accents sound {friendly/ignorant and uneducated}.”
Here, of course, our interest in language is entirely scientific; we aren’t going to wallow in our normative beliefs, but try to come to terms with them as an object of study. The questions at hand are:
•
What might we do as linguistic scientists to make sure that our work remains objective in the face of normative beliefs?
•
How do we find out about normative beliefs and assess them?
•
Where do normative beliefs come from? Why do they arise?
•
Are normative beliefs ever “justified” in a factual sense?
1.1
The professional practice of linguists concerning normative beliefs
First, normative beliefs arise for linguists as a methodological issue. We want to do good science, and it’s quite likely that our normative beliefs might impede our scientific objectivity.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 43
My own favorite metaphor for this is the clean white lab coat—the emblem that a laboratory scientist wants to keep the samples clean and uncontaminated. As linguists, we keep our lab coats clean (in part) by ignoring what we feel about language, and concentrating on the data.
Scientific objectivity is of course a goal that cannot always be attained. Everyone, including experienced linguists, has normative beliefs, and we can’t really make them go away. To speak personally on this point: I find that whenever I encounter a phrase like “very unique,” or the pronunciation [»nukjulr] for nuclear, I experience a certain feeling of indignation. Both cases are instances where the normative belief is one that favors the older meaning or pronunciation. I will continue to feel this way for the foreseeable future. But as a scholar I know there is nothing inherently wrong with them, and when I am doing linguistics I can try to factor out my feelings from my thoughts and analysis.
This has various consequences for how linguistics is conducted. First, linguists tend to use carefully-selected vocabulary that shows that, for professional purposes, they are not buying into the beliefs that are held by (many of) the speakers of the language being investigated. For instance, a linguist would be likely to use the term “nonstandard” rather than “substandard.”
Second, the culture of the field seems generally aware that there is a need to be vigilant about normative beliefs. I believe that if a linguist let slip a blatant normative belief in a lecture at the annual Linguistic Society of America, there would later be quite a bit of smirking and mockery in the hotel bar…
Lastly, normative beliefs are not just “factored out” where appropriate, but made into a object of study: where do they come from? are they ever rational? why are often they so intense? Some discussion of these questions follows below.
1.2
Investigating normative beliefs
To learn about normative beliefs, a good starting point is simply to attend to what people say about language. For instance, the “Cockney” dialect of English is that historically spoken by poor and working-class people in poorer neighborhoods of London. It is fairly familiar to Americans because we hear it in mouths of fictional characters of these background in film and drama. Here is a reported opinion of Cockney from about a century ago:
‘inspectors and teachers of English in London elementary schools who met in conference in 1906 declared that “The Cockney [London lower-class] mode of speech, with its unpleasant twang, is a modern corruption without legitimate credentials, and is unworthy of being the speech of any person in the capital city of the Empire.’17
The description may surprise us, since the Cockney we hear is sentimentalized; usually placed in the mouths of characters who are uneducated but have a heart of gold.
17 Source: Does Accent Matter? (1989) by John Honey.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 44
All over the world, there are dialects that are considered (by many people) to be prestigious and dialects that are considered (by many people) to be non-prestigious (of which Cockney is one example). The non-prestigious dialects are spoken on various bases:
•
Social class, as in Cockney.
•
Minority ethnicity, as in the German-influenced varieties of English spoken in North Dakota and neighboring states, or African-American English Vernacular (Black English).
•
Geography: the varieties of Korean spoken outside Seoul, and the varieties of Japanese spoken outside Tokyo, tend to be stigmatized.
To some degree, you can get an idea of the prestige of varieties of language just by asking people, but social psychologists have tried to be more systematic about it. A favored research method is the so-called matched-guise experiment:18 you find a perfect bilingual or bidialectal, and have them say (more or less) the same thing in both of the language varieties in question. You also mix in many other voices, so that, if all goes well, the experimental subjects who listen to the recording aren’t aware that one person is speaking twice. The subject are asked to rate the speakers on various scales, for instance:
•
intelligence
•
suitability for employment
•
trustability
•
likelihood to be a friend
The measurement of interest concerns how these ratings differ for the recordings of the same speaker saying (essentially) the same thing in two languages or dialects.
By now, dozens of matched-guise experiments have been carried out around the world. Generally, they show what you might expect: that speakers of prestigious dialects are judged as more intelligent and suited to positions of responsibility. For the more intimate criteria of trustability and friendliness, the less prestigious variety sometimes wins, but quite often the more prestigious variety does. Often enough, prestigious varieties are preferred even by the native speakers of the non-prestigious variety.
This is what such experiments teach us. However, they are limited in their scope - a formal experimental setting might well bias the subjects’ responses. A more nuanced view would be that there are different kinds of prestige. Nonstandard varieties are valued, at least by their speakers, as badges of community membership, and members of a community with a non-standard dialect who speak the standard dialect to their peers are “sending a message” that might not be particularly desirable to be sending.
Educators, particularly of young children, often have an extremely delicate task: they judge that teaching a standard variety to non-standard speakers will help their students with their lives and careers, but the tacit message “your dialect is inferior” that may come with this training is not a very nice—or, as we will see, valid—message to give to kids. Enlightened educators try to
18 A good review is in Ralph Fasold (1984) The Sociolinguistics of Society, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Chapter 6.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 45
steer a course between the need to teach a standard, and the need not to alienate their students when teaching the standard.
1.3
The origin of normative beliefs
Why do people have normative beliefs about language? This question is in need of further study, but it seems reasonable to point out two possible sources.
1.3.1
Societal division
Many normative beliefs seem to stem from the divisions found in a society. I don’t think it is controversial to say that every society is in a state of conflict, ranging from mild to extreme. The divisions can be ethnic, economic, or geographic. In general, the varieties of language that are affiliated with power will be the more prestigious ones. This includes varieties spoken by wealthier and better-educated people; the varieties spoken in the capital city of a country; and the varieties spoken by the politically dominant ethnicity. Putting this more crudely, people on top of the heap often find it easy to despise the language spoken by people lower down.
An interesting comparison of this sort can be made when the very same language has different status in different locations. French has an exalted status in France, where it is the dominant language, but until recent decades it had had low status in Quebec, where the ethnic minority that spoke it was economically dominated by English speakers. German once had very high status in Latvia, where it was the language of an economically dominant foreign-based minority. German was less prestigious in 19th century America, where it was widely spoken but gradually abandoned by its speakers in favor of English.
1.3.2
Linguistic conservatism
A rather different, and less political, source of normative beliefs results from the ever-present process of language change. Typically, speakers will feel that the older forms of a language are inherently “correct” and that the innovating forms are wrong. For example, “it is I” is the older form; “it is me” is an innovation. Putting the accent on the first syllable of compensate and confiscate was considered pretty vulgar in the 18th century, since at that time many people still used the old pronunciation with the accent on the second syllable.
1.3.3
Are normative beliefs ever justified?
Let us now take on the most loaded question about normative beliefs: is it really true that one language or dialect legitimately be called inferior to another?
It seems unlikely to me that any language could be significantly simpler than any other. The reason I believe this is that field workers who go to work on a language never believe that they’re done. A responsible and accurate reference grammar of a language will go on for hundreds of pages, and still be giving just a rough outline of many areas. The languages for which the only grammars are thin ones are the languages that haven’t been studied much. What we know about English would probably fill a large bookshelf. There’s little reason to doubt that the same would hold of any other language that was submitted to the same intensity of study.
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 46
Often, grammatical issues in a particular language are subtle or complex, and thus difficult for the linguist to establish confidently. This holds true just as much for languages spoken by peoples with simple material culture as for languages spoke in large, industrialized countries.
A related point is that all languages seem to be about equally expressive: roughly speaking, whatever can be thought, can be said in any language; though the degree of effort needed might vary in certain cases.
This claim is probably true for dialects as well. A famous article by the linguist William Labov, “The Logic of Nonstandard English,”19 made a case for the grammatical integrity of Black English as a system (a well known fact about the dialect is that it has distinctions of verbal tense not available in the standard), and also for the distinction between being a speaker of a prestigious dialect and being an articulate speaker (there are both articulate and inarticulate speakers of both prestigious and nonprestigious dialects).
Naturally, languages differ greatly in vocabulary. A language will normally include a vocabulary suitable for the culture within which it is spoken; and indeed, experience suggests that it is not at all easy just to take a random language “off the shelf” and adapt it instantly to the needs of an industrialized society. But this seems to be a rather superficial difference, as with time languages can acquire new vocabulary (through borrowing and derivational morphology) to accommodate any culturally-novel concept.
Languages also differ in their morphological complexity. But it would be a mistake to equate morphology with complexity. In English, for instance, the inflectional morphology is very simple, but the choice of articles (the vs. a) is a monstrously complex and difficult topic; it just happens to be a problem in syntax and semantics, not morphology.
Earlier in this text I very tentatively suggested that there may be some virtue in inflectionally-impoverished languages like Chinese, which don’t force their speakers to make commitments they don’t want or need to make. Yet as a native speaker of a mildly inflectional language, I feel it is implausible that the inflectional choices of English are somehow hampering my ability to communicate, and I’m sure that native speakers of heavily inflected languages like Turkish or Finnish would feel the same.
1.3.4
Putative cases of “illogicality” in language
It is sometimes said that stigmatized languages or dialects are “illogical.” For example, in many dialects of English (including Black English), the sentence corresponding to standard English “You don’t know anything” is “You don’t know nothing”. Some people believe that this makes the non-standard dialects “illogical”, in that they are “really saying” something they don’t mean, namely “it is not the case that you know nothing.”
The absurdity of this is revealed by looking at other, non-stigmatized languages, which do the same thing without being looked down upon. For example, in French “You don’t know anything” would be translated as “Tu ne sais rien”, literally “You not know nothing.”
19 In his book Language and the Inner City (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1974).
Hayes Introductory Linguistics p. 47
In fact, in non-standard English dialects, “You don’t know nothing” is completely clear and unambiguous. The way one would say “It is not the case that you know nothing” would be “You don’t know nothing”, with a heavy accent placed on nothing. There is no possibility for confusion.
The “illogicality” accusation is based on a fundamental analytic error, that of analyzing other languages or dialects from the viewpoint of one’s own language or dialect. Every language and dialect has a grammar, which to be understood has to be studied in its own terms.
I conclude that at present there seems to be very little justification for any claims that one language or dialect is superior to another. Naturally, since I have my “white lab coat” on (see above), I would not want to exclude the possibility that such justification could be discovered in the future, but this is at present a hypothetical possibility.
1.4
Summary: normative beliefs.
Summing up: normative beliefs about languages and dialects are found everywhere. They can be measured in matched-guise experiments, and typically are a reflection of the hierarchy and conflicts (economic, ethnic, geographic) within a society. With regard to particular grammatical constructions, words, and pronunciations within a single dialect, normative beliefs usually involve adherence to slightly archaic variants, that is to say, resistance to change.
Linguists, aspiring to be scientists,seek to be aware of their own normative beliefs, in order to be able to guard against bias.A number of scholars are actively interested in the nature and causes of normative beliefs and examine them as a research topic.