Mark Sebba

Phonology for conversation: Phonetic aspects of turn delimitation in London Jamaican

Abstract Participants in conversation have at their disposal many ways of showing that their speaking-turn is complete. An important resource for achieving this interactive task is provided by phonetic features. However, the precise role of these features has been obscured because analysts have relied too heavily on their intuitions, particularly about intonational meaning. Drawing on techniques developed within Conversation Analysis we give a precise formulation of the role of phonetic features in turn-delimitation in the speech of London Jamaicans. We show that turn-delimitation in London Jamaican may be signalled by features of pitch, loudness and rhythm centred on the last syllable of the turn. In this respect, London Jamaican is different from some other varieties of English.

Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts

The study of spoken discourse in a mixture of languages, commonly called ‘conversational code-switching’, has a history of several decades, and a number of well-developed theories compete to account for it. A number of researchers have studied multilingual written discourse from different perspectives, but most of these studies have focussed on interactive genres that resemble conversation. Only a few studies have offered analyses of multilingual texts with prominent visual aspects, such as advertisements, posters and web pages. This article briefly reviews research on written code-switching and then goes on to introduce examples of multilingual and multimodal texts that, although they involve combinations of languages within a text, do not correspond to what is normally regarded as code-switching. It argues that an insightful account of these phenomena requires an understanding of the kinds of multilingual literacy practices with which they are associated. Furthermore, for an insightful account of them to be given, they need to be analysed as multimodal texts, where visual and spatial aspects of the whole are crucial to interpretation. The article presents a framework for analysing multimodal, multilingual texts in terms of their visual and spatial as well as linguistic characteristics, and examples of how this can be applied to actual data.

Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research

Writing systems have attracted relatively little attention from sociolinguists, in spite of obvious connections with subjects of great sociolinguistic interest, such as ethnicity and identity. In fact, the literature contains a substantial amount of research on writing systems from a sociolinguistic perspective, but there is no recognised ‘sociolinguistics of writing systems’ within which different case studies can be researched and compared from a social and cultural point of view. This article will discuss and review research in the sociolinguistics of both writing systems and orthographies, taking a perspective drawn from literacy studies which treats writing systems as social practice. The paper will focus on stages of writing system development where social and cultural considerations typically play a role: the initial choice of script, the period when the orthography and/or script is developed, and once it is an established system in regular use. There is also a discussion of how social and cultural factors are involved in, and often stand in the way of, writing system reform.

A Congruence Approach to the Syntax of Codeswitching

Hypotheses about the syntax of codeswitching thus far have for the most part not taken into account such factors as the nature of bilingualism in the community where the switching takes place, the relative status of the languages, the nature of bilingualism in the community and other aspects of the social context. This paper argues that an adequate theory of codeswitching syntax is one where such factors are held to be relevant, so that the actual nature of the switching is relative not only to the language pairs, but also to other situational factors. Previous researchers have used notions of “congruent” or “equivalent” categories, implicitly or explicitly, tending to treat these as universal categories of phrase structure and looking for “constraints” which limit the possible outcome of the interaction of two linguistic systems. This paper argues that “congruence” of categories is construed or “created” by bilinguals in a given situation, with four alternative outcomes for a given candidate switch: harmonization, neutralization, compromise, and blocking. Rather than seeing codeswitching utterances as the product of “constraints,” it develops a view where codeswitching is the result of languages aligning their structures over time to achieve congruence.

“Global” and “Local” identities in the discourses of British-born Caribbeans

British Caribbeans manifest both a “global” and a “local” identity through complex language behavior including codeswitching. It is the Creole which most connects “globally” — to other speakers of Creole, to the British youth culture which now accepts Creole/patois as an element, and to the world-wide Black music culture. Meanwhile “English” for black speakers is more likely to mean a local variety of English, for example, London, Birmingham, or Manchester, which identifies the speaker as a member of the local community. In this paper we start from the viewpoint that “identities” are texts of social practice based on the identifications made in interactions between individuals(in this case, conversations). Looking both at the content of discourse(what is said) and the medium used(the language or language variety used in an utterance) we attempt to illustrate how global diasporic discourses of identity are reproduced at the local level. We argue that the “global” and “local” identities of British Caribbeans manifest and reproduce themselves through everyday discourse, and are constructed through identifications in which the choice of language and the choice of words interact and are both significant.

Derivational regularities in a Creole lexicon: the case of Sranan

Sranan uses reduplication, compounding and mult ifunc t tonality to extend its lexicon. Compounding is a regular and productive process. Reduplication is productive in the case of verbs and adjectives, but applies sporadically in the case of nouns, although some partially productive paradigms can be isolated. There are constraints on the occurrence of homophonous reduplicated forms belonging to the same category. Multifunctionality is common in Sranan but is not completely productive. It is subject to syntactic constraints which can account for the nonoccurrence of some expected forms. Sranan also has syntactically derived nominals which, although not morphologically distinct from verbs, have different properties.

Coding and analysing multilingual data: the LIDES project

Over the last few decades, the study of bilingual and plurilingual talk has been an important focus for linguists. Data have been collected through projects, large and small, in many countries and involving many different languages and dialects. This has been in the form of monographs describing particular linguistic situations where codeswitching (CS) is prevalent (Bentahila, 1983; Agnihotri, 1987; Gibbons, 1987; Heath, 1989; Nortier, 1990; Gardner-Chloros, 1991; Myers- Scotton, 1993a; Sebba, 1993; Treffers-Daller, 1994; Haust, 1995; Backus, 1996; Halmari, 1997; Zentella, 1997; McCormick, 2002; Nivens, 2002). Two books have been devoted to the grammatical aspects of CS (Myers- Scotton, 1993b; Muysken, 2000), as well as a further volume by Myers- Scotton (2002) developing her grammatical theory in the broader context of language contact. Chapters or sections have been devoted to CS in the principal volumes on bilingualism and language contact which include Romaine’s Bilingualism (1994), Coulmas’s Handbook of Sociolinguistics (1997), Hamers and Blanc’s Bilinguality and Bilingualism (2000), Li Wei (2000), Thomason (2001), Clyne (2003). A number of edited collections and special issues of journals have been devoted to different aspects of CS (Heller, 1988; Eastman, 1992; Milroy and Muysken, 1995; Auer, 1998; Jacobson, 1998; and Dolitsky, 2000).

Towards standardizing and sharing bilingual data

We describe a project (the LIPPS project) whose purpose is to set up a computerized database of bilingual texts to be used by researchers in the field of “language interaction” (i.e., codeswitching, borrowing, and other outcomes of contact between varieties). Current work includes an adaptation of the CHILDES system(MacWhinney,1995) to take account of the different needs of researchers in this area, for example, solving the problems of distinguishing, coding, and representing language interaction phenomena; providing a gloss / translation in user-friendly format; and developing qualitative as well as quantitative tools for comparing data-sets. Problems and some advantages of such a comparison are illustrated through a pilot project conducted by Gardner-Chloros using two sets of data: Greek-Cypriot/English data and Punjabi /English. Practical problems included giving transcribers/coders the necessary training in using the system and ensuring a consistent approach. Coding problems derived from interlinguistic differences were also highlighted. Clear advantages ensued, however, from being able to compare the type/quantity of codeswitches and so forth across data-sets, as this allows an assessment of the relative weight of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in determining the form of language interaction.

You know what I mean? Agreement marking in British black English

Abstract Evidence is produced to show that in London Jamaican, a type of Jamaican Creole, Bradford Jamaican, another variety of Jamaican Creole, and the London English of Caribbean adolescents, the tags you know what I mean and you know are used to perform rather than to elicit agreements, as they do in better-studied varieties of English. The evidence rests on conversational data collected by the authors in different parts of London and in Bradford, in the course of two separate research projects. It is argued that the sequential placement of you know what I mean and you know , and the responses to them by other participants in the conversation, require them to be treated as instances of agreement marking.

Awkward questions: language issues in the 2011 census in England

ABSTRACT The 2011 Census in England broke new ground, as a question about language had never previously been asked. After stakeholder consultations and a series of trials, the census authority decided on two questions based on earlier censuses in the USA: one about the respondent’s ‘main language’ and another about proficiency in English. This paper provides a critique of the census questions, showing how the pressure to produce questions which were straightforward to answer and consistent with the predominant monolingual ideology led to the choice of two questions which were problematic in different ways. This raises doubts about the validity of the questions themselves and the usefulness of the data collected.