Introdungcing English language part 18 potx

88 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH time’), and a symmetrical signal at the end that the classroom pragmatics are resumed (‘and they all lived happily ever after’). As a child develops the ability to adopt a cog- nitive stance that is fictional or otherwise projected, the finalising signal is dropped, and then later the opening signal is dropped: story stance comes to be signalled in the shift to other, more subtle and sophisticated features of writing. SCHEMAS Imagine you are walking into what you think is a restaurant on the planet Zog. You think it is a restaurant because you have been directed there by a friendly English- speaking hotel barman, but you do not speak, read or have any telepathic ability in Zogan, the language of Zog. Obviously it is a problem that you lack the necessary linguistic knowledge, so – Zogan technology being quite advanced – you download the grammar and vocabulary from a free online site directly into your brain. The gram- mar at least is surprisingly like the Yorkshire dialect of twenty-first-century English. Filled with confidence, you stride into the restaurant. You see no tables or chairs, only tanks of clear pink liquid in which there are either plants or fish – you are not sure which. ‘Can I get something to eat here?’ you ask the Zogan person who burbles up to you. ‘Aye, yer [singular] can,’ says the Zogan, and slithers away, leaving you standing there. You do not know what to do; all you can think is that you are very hungry, and you picture a plate of roast beef, vegetables and Yorkshire puddings with gravy. In an instant, you feel full and not hungry any more, so you leave the restaurant. Later, over a cup of steaming cold ztroob in the hotel bar, the barman explains that in Zogan restaurants, your order is taken telepathically and the food is instantly teleported into your stomach. You discover that the exorbitant cost of the food has also been tele- ported out of your wallet. It was the most expensive restaurant in the whole of Zog. You might have found yourself in a similar – though probably not identical – situation at some point in your life, where an unfamiliar context caused you com- municative problems. In the Zogan restaurant, in spite of possessing well-formed syntax and the right vocabulary, choosing what to say and do has defeated you because you do not have the appropriate frame of knowledge that will allow you to function properly in the situation. Of course, the next time you visit a Zogan eaterie, you will be better prepared: your first-time mistakes constitute a process of learning how this situation works. Storing linguistic knowledge In psycholinguistics, a knowledge frame that you need to behave appropriately is a schema (plural ‘schemata’, though the anglicised form ‘schemas’ is more common). Many approaches within linguistics have required a vague category of ‘encyclopedic knowledge’ that a hearer or reader has to deploy in order to make sense of what is being said. Schema theory is an attempt to specify exactly how this works. Though philosophers have suggested earlier versions of schemas, the theory itself was invented in the 1960s as part of the search for creating artificial intelligence. It quickly became B7 SCHEMAS 89 apparent that computers and software needed a sense of experience and context to be able to communicate in anything like a natural human way. The problem for researchers is deciding which part of the vast array of knowl- edge is relevant for a particular moment of language use. For example, when we walk up to a (terrestrial) restaurant, it is clear that our knowledge of science fiction stories, beach holidays, dog-walking or the many thousands of other areas of our general knowl- edge is not likely to be as relevant as our knowledge of restaurants. Although all of our previous experiences of individual restaurants might be stored in memory, when we enter this particular new restaurant, we are drawing on an idealised, distilled repre- sentation of all of those experiences: this idealised, schematic model is a schema. We know that we need our restaurant schema because we are standing in front of a restaurant. Where the location defines the appropriate set of knowledge, a situational schema is invoked. Where the schema that is required depends on your individual role – such as being a train passenger, being a boyfriend, or being a gardener – you will draw on a personal schema. And where you need operational knowledge and skill to be able to do something – such as drive a car, write an essay, or mend a chair – you will use an instrumental schema. These different sorts of schemas tell you what to expect, and how to behave, includ- ing how to behave linguistically (and the prominence of language behaviour in schemas led to an earlier version in the theory being referred to as scripts). Your choice of words will be different when you are in different schemas with different expecta- tions of formality, for example. Your choice of syntax will vary, your sense of prag- matic requirements like interruptions, politeness or rudeness norms, your sense of turn-taking in conversation – all of these features of language will vary depending on the schema you think is most appropriate. Misjudging the schema can lead to con- fusion, hostility, rudeness, or just a plain failure of communication. Using linguistic knowledge A particular schema is invoked by various forms of header that trigger the most appro- priate set of knowledge and behaviour. Being physically in the location where a par- ticular schema usually occurs is an obvious trigger for that schema: examples such as standing in front of a restaurant, or being at a football game, or attending a family party would all instantiate the restaurant, football or party schemas by a locale header. Where the schema is prepared by some gesture or reference in advance, this is a precondition header. So being hungry, or driving past a restaurant, or receiving an invitation to a meal would all act as triggers for the restaurant scheme. Where the trigger is primarily an action which is a means of realising the schema, such as booking a table at the restaurant, this is an instrumental header. Lastly, and especially in written texts which displace your thinking to some other, virtual schema different from the here-and-now, an internal conceptualisation header is where some element from within the schema is mentioned or encountered. For example, a scene from a film that opens at a restaurant table, or in a hotel kitchen, is likely to instantiate the restaurant schema. Once the schema is running, definite references can be made without sounding odd. For example, in a narrative with a restaurant schema in operation for the hearer, the storyteller can say things like ‘the waiter arrived’, ‘the food was cold’, or ‘the tip 90 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH was generous’ without you becoming confused (‘oh, was there a waiter?’, ‘what food?’, ‘you didn’t say they left a tip’) and without the storyteller having to set out all of the objects in the situation (‘there was a waiter’, ‘some food was brought’, ‘we left a tip’). There usually needs to be more than one header to trigger a schema, unless the header is especially prominent or central to the schema in question. So being hungry might not invoke the restaurant schema by itself, but entering a restaurant by itself would. Where a single header belongs to a schema, but is not enough to trigger the schema fully, the script or schema is said to be fleeting. For example, passing by a restaurant on the road (a single locale header) might create a fleeting restaurant schema, but not stopping would cause that frame of reference to fade quickly from consciousness. Different types of header often combine, and of course the more that are combined, the stronger the likelihood that a particular schema will then be instantiated. For ex- ample, having booked a table, you are welcomed by a waiter at the entrance to a restaurant just as you are really hungry – it is almost inconceivable that at this point you would be running anything other than a restaurant schema. A schema, by definition, is a schematised representation of an ideal experience, but it is possible to examine the compositional elements that make up a schema. Any such frame of knowledge will consist of various slots that are filled out to create a rich representation of the situation at hand. Examples of these slots include props (all the objects that usually occur in the schema scenario) and participants (the expected people in the situation). So strong is the inventory of props and participants in a schema that the word ‘but’ in the following sentence seems entirely natural. – ‘We went into the restaurant but it was empty’ while the following sentence seems odd – ‘We went into the restaurant but there were waiters and tables there.’ Aside from the preparatory headers that instantiate a schema, the schema itself will often have a narrativised sequence of further slots that is normal and expected. The restaurant schema typically has entry conditions involving walking into the restaur- ant, sitting down and ordering food. There is an expected sequence of events within the narrative of the schema, involving eating, drinking and conversation, and completing the restaurant schema has results that are usually satisfaction, or food poisoning, or going home. Even non-situational schemas (personal and instrumental scripts) possess typical props and participants, and are often conceptualised in narrative terms with opening, sequential and resulting features. Adapting linguistic knowledge Restaurants without central slot elements are a challenge to comprehension that might motivate an enrichment of the schema on the one hand, or confusion on the other: a restaurant without tables, chairs or a menu (a tapas bar, for example); a restaur- ant without waiters (a self-service joint); a restaurant with nothing and nobody there (closed down?). Most everyday discourse consists of the normal and expected application of schema knowledge without problems. This confirmatory experience is schema STANDARDISATION 91 preservation, and can even be seen on repeated exposure as being schema reinforcement. However, we occasionally encounter scenarios in which the schema is disrupted to a minor extent: there is a restaurant chain called ‘Dans le Noir’, in which diners eat in complete darkness, for example, which represents a conceptual as well as practical challenge. One way in which these disruptions can be resolved is by schema accretion, or the enrichment of an existing schema. So rather than create a new ‘sensory depriva- tion restaurant’ schema, you simply expand your existing schema to include this new aspect of the frame of knowledge. Your schema acquires a richer inventory and com- plexity of slots, or you establish a greater number of tracks through your schema. Where the challenge is more radical (you might find yourself transported in a science-fictional scenario to a ‘restaurant at the end of the universe’, for example), there might be a complete retuning of the schema so that the schema itself is radically reconceptualised: this is schema refreshment. Where your past conception of a schema turns out to have been completely wrong (sailing towards the edge of the flat Earth, you discover the planet is actually a globe), this is a thorough schema replacement: fundamental shifts in knowledge and understanding are involved here. Schemas, then, are experiential frames for understanding concepts, situations and the discourse that accompanies them. They can be highly conventional and fixed, or adaptable and flexible, or very provisional and transitory: one of your book’s authors once deployed a very sketchy schema for assisting a vet at the delivery of a calf, a schema that he possessed largely through television and books rather than any direct experi- ence. For the vet, this schema was a very rich and fixed one; as an Arts Faculty academic it is highly unlikely that Peter will ever need it again. Schemas display prototype effects (see A7), in the sense that there are central parts of the schema and more peripheral aspects. Furthermore, some schemas will be regarded as central parts of our lives, and these will tend to be the most fixed domains with which we feel most comfortable. Others will be relatively sketchily formed or even barely existent. For new experiences at these edges of our lives, we will need either to create new schemas, or to adapt very heavily schematic knowledge that we already possess. STANDARDISATION All languages that have living speakers change over time. That change is unevenly dis- tributed so at any one moment there are always several varieties of the language in existence in different places. Diachronic change over time and synchronic variety across a point in time, then, are the proper and natural states of all living languages. Language change happens for many reasons, mostly products of subconscious individual shifts or general drifts across large swathes of population that are too enormous to be perceived at any one moment. However, one of the reasons for change is an awareness that language is changing, which sometimes leads to a deliberate intervention by some people to prevent what they see as undesirable changes in the patterns of language. It is ironic that all of the attempts by everyone who has ever tried B8 92 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH to stop language changing have failed, and often result in further and faster changes in the language (see also strand 9). Stability and change In general, diachronically then, there are two contrary forces of impulse and drag oper- ating on language across time. Impulse is given to language by the inexorable evolu- tion of societies requiring new forms of expression for all the social complexities and fluid relationships that move over time. Drag acts as a brake on change in the form of types of expression that resist change: printing, the education system, governmental and administrative structures, and the desire for mutual intelligibility. Synchronically there are also two contrary forces of diversity and homogenisation operating on language across its territory of usage. Homogenisation is the tendency to converge all forms of the language together into a single variety, often by allocating pres- tige to the approved version and stigmatising the others. It is a tendency aimed for either intentionally or coincidentally by governments, the education system, and comment- ators on language such as journalists, academics and professional writers. Diversity is the opposite social force which resists language becoming monologic: language loyalty and innovation are the keys to diversity. In this unit, we will explore all of these ideas. The historical forces acting to change language are largely social and economic. For example, the Great Vowel Shift (see A8) can be seen as a consequence of migra- tion towards London from the East Midlands of England in the Middle Ages. As people from the wool villages and market towns moved to the capital in search of commercial wealth, they adopted the accent patterns of the Londoners in order not to appear too regional. This happened over many decades of migration. Unfortunately, whenever a person tries to pick up another accent deliberately, they often hypercorrect its features. Even more unfortunately, new waves of migrants to London set about imitating the hypercorrected accents of those recently arrived, adding their own accentuation again. The result was a general raising of vowel sounds that then became associated with the emerging middle class, and began to spread north- wards and westwards throughout England. In this case, geographical mobility reinforced by social mobility led to a major change in pronunciation patterns in English. Other social and economic events have led to changes in English. The colonial settlement of America, Australia and East Africa led to those parts of the world taking the accents and dialects of their settlers and begin- ning a new history that eventually diverged from the varieties of language spoken in Britain. Wars like those against France in the Middle Ages led to the adoption of English by the ruling class rather than French, and an expansion of vocabulary. Diseases like the great medieval plagues made English-speaking labour more scarce and thus more highly valued. Diseases worsened by economic policy, as in the potato famines of Ireland in the nineteenth century, led to mass migration of Gaelic and English speakers to America, where the common language was another form of English. The Industrial Revolution led to a clearance of the countryside towards the factories, mills and slum housing of the towns and cities, and new urban accents and dialects emerged. Against these forces of language change, the contrary process of standardisation worked towards fixing the language. From the time of King Alfred in the ninth cen- tury, through the Tudors’ nation-building policies of the later Middle Ages, to the STANDARDISATION 93 education reforms of the nineteenth century and the national school curriculum of the late twentieth century, governments have been interested in standardising the English language for ideological and political ends. The major tools of standardisation are in the domain of writing. The gradual replacement of manuscripts with printed books, leaflets and newspapers led to fixed spellings of words. Though Shakespeare, for ex- ample, was comfortable with variable spellings across the same text, these days spelling has become so standardised that poor spelling is even taken as a sign of general lack of intelligence, or moral sloppiness. When highly prestigious texts – such as Shakespeare and other literature, the Bible, government documents, announcements, laws and national newspapers – all adopt a particular variety of the language, this is known as codification (see A10 and B10). In medieval English, the East Midlands dialect from Nottinghamshire across to Cambridgeshire and down to London came to be adopted as the prestigious dialect of English for the same social reasons as set out above. Once codified in prestigious texts, it becomes the required norm in other texts. Dictionaries and grammars appear which treat the selected dialect as Standard English, to the extent that people no longer even call it a dialect. Other varieties of English come to be regarded as ‘dialectal’ and sub-standard. This codification is then preserved and promoted through the educa- tion system, so that the use of Standard English comes to be seen as the mark of the educated person, and it attracts even more prestige. Standardisation, then, can sometimes be an accident of history as well as a delib- erate act of language planning. In the later twentieth century, Standard English was very much promoted as the ‘correct’ form of English, with many people becoming absurdly and hysterically outraged at any deviation from this standardised norm. ‘Rules’ of writing which are quite arbitrary, matters of fashion, or the idiosyncracies of influential people come to be treated as sacred: q Double negation (properly ‘negative concord’) is condemned as if language worked by logic. ‘I ain’t never been there’ is just emphatic. ‘No no’ does not mean ‘yes’. Negative concord was standard until the nineteenth century. q Preferring ‘different from’ to ‘different to’ is entirely wrongly argued by exten- sion from the verb ‘to differ’. q Sentences like ‘Hopefully the car will start’ are condemned, based on an incorrect model of grammar that does not recognise the pragmatic function of the adverbs here. q The rule against splitting an infinitive (‘To boldly go . . .’) is a ridiculous imposi- tion of Latin grammar (where it is impossible to do it anyway) onto English. q Avoiding ending a sentence with a preposition (‘Where are you from?’) is also an import from Latin, and would create bizarrely convoluted and obscure sentences (‘From where are you?’). How would you rewrite: ‘I ran a bill up’? q Complaining about abbreviations is simply a matter of taste. The eighteenth- century writer Jonathan Swift disliked these especially, condemning ‘mob’ (mobile), ‘fan’ (fanatick) and ‘rep’ (reputation), but shortening has been a continuing useful feature of English since its origins. q Preferring ‘10 items or fewer’ to ‘10 items or less’ is an affectation based on an arcane grammarian’s knowledge of count nouns that places pedantry over communicativeness. . human way. The problem for researchers is deciding which part of the vast array of knowl- edge is relevant for a particular moment of language use. For example, when we walk up to a (terrestrial). has ever tried B8 92 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH to stop language changing have failed, and often result in further and faster changes in the language (see also strand 9). Stability and change In. and comment- ators on language such as journalists, academics and professional writers. Diversity is the opposite social force which resists language becoming monologic: language loyalty and