[From: Bruce Nevin (Tue 93032 14:30:23)]
Too much to respond to, no hope of catching up, but you hooked me
here, apparently.
[Bill Powers (930222.1300)] --
At one level, we want to explain how people can come to speak in
a certain way. That's not very hard to explain with PCT, I think.
They make the sounds they hear match the sounds they intend to
hear.
"Intend" has a peculiar duplicity here. Often, to judge from my
actual utterances, I "intend" to hear myself saying things in a
manner that is [socially defined as] "contrary" to the way that I
am conscious of intending. No quarrel, or even quibble, just
troubled by the depth of the "awareness" problem in this.
But at another level, we have to ask "Why do they want to hear
one set of sounds rather than another?" The answer to this
question can't given on linguistic grounds, but on the basis of
relationships with other people, self-image, and so forth.
That's most of what I'm trying to get at. We have
to model the perception and control of social interactions, with
language as one facet of them but with many other considerations
of equal importance.
The norms we adopt pertain to all
sorts of behavior, and our perception of "likeness" to those whom
we want to be like include far more than the way they talk. The
GENERAL problem we want to solve has to do with the perception of
likeness and where people set their reference levels for it, not
any particular example of it.
To this apply all the problematic aspects of mimicry that you
noted in a later response to Martin. Only perhaps worse: that
is, I can imagine seeing your glasses in your hand from your
point of view, but unless I have considerable experience with
recording equipment I cannot imagine the acoustic image of my
voice as others hear it. The reference perceptions must be for
the subjective (intracranial) acoustic image, not for the voice
that others hear. Similarly for much of gesture, posture, and
body language. So the reference perceptions must be adjusted and
established with respect to factors in others' responses to us.
Do they recognize us as the kind of person we intend to present
ourselves as? Do they accord to us social roles and expectations
that are acceptable or (better, of course) that we desire? Do we
get a balance of our desire for independence vs. our desire for
acceptance and intimacy that is acceptable to us? Oops! Do we
even know how to talk about independence vs. intimacy in PCT
terms?
That what what I intended to communicate -- that the illusion of
the glottal stop would appear only in speakers who had to prevent
themselves from extending the vowel into a diphthong in order to
imagine matching the heard vowel.
Now why would a speaker of one language *have* to end a
word-final stressed syllable with a diphthong or a consonant?
Clearly, there is no physiological or neurological constraint,
which would have to apply to speakers of all languages. Rather,
there is a socially instituted pattern on the basis of which
speaker/hearer's expectations get set. There may be differences
of detail between individuals, but we compensate for these very
quickly (one imagines some analog of a lookup table or rules of
conversion). A former professor, Dell Hymes, pronounced the "th"
voiceless in "although" (like the th in thing rather than the th
in all the other th words in this sentence); a CS professor at
MIT whose name I forget (I saw him on a videotape of a lecture on
user interface design) pronounces the medial consonant in
"button" as a voiced flap (as in an informal, rapid pronunciation
of latter, ladder, butter); my 6-year-old, Katrina, has resolved
the neutralization of intervocalic t/d in favor of t, so that she
actually says "datty" for "Daddy" when pronouncing carefully
(just like a careful pronunciation of butter, latter). We
compensate in the sense of knowing what was intended and what our
own pronunciation of it (the recognized word) would be.
In conversation we may feel obligated either to maintain our
contrary pronunciation or to conform to the other's pronunciation
(out of friendliness, so as not to embarrass the other, etc.)
Happens around here all the time around the pronunciation of
"route" and "router" (is it like the nether appendage of a tree
or like the flight of an army in defeat). We heard a lot of
"hair-ess" vs. "her-ass" during the Anita defamations, er,
Clarence Thomas hearings. We feel a need to be consistent with
one another, and out of this does develop impressive consistency
in social conventions or norms associated with subpopulations to
which people identify themselves as belonging.
When you eliminate the dialect itself as a means of identifying
the subpopulation, what is left? Location of residence, income,
sex, age, education, occupation -- all the marks that traditional
psychology has tried to use as an "objective" way of identifying
populations. It is notoriously difficult even to define a
"population" in psychological experiments -- why should it be any
easier for linguists? And why should these marks of membership in
populations work for linguistics as predictors of verbal behavior
any better than they do in psychology as predictors of any kind
of behavior? I look askance at all purported "facts" that were
established by these traditional means.
But we don't have to identify subpopulations "objectively."
People--the members of the social groups--do it for us. Or
rather they do it for themselves, and for each other. And social
dialect is an excellent index when you consider natives of a
place like NYC, for example. (Don't take my word for it, have a
look at Labov's methods and results in the papers in _Language in
the Inner City_ f'rinstance.) Sure, there are people that don't
fit in, including obviously tourists and immigrants from other
regions, but also effortful misfits of one sort or another. This
is simply true: there are people that don't fit in the major
social strata and groupings of any given community. Sometimes
their seeming idiosyncrasies turn out to be negations or
reversals of the norms of one or more existing groups, by which
they deny membership. Sometimes they take on characteristics
associated with one or more truly "foreign" groups (the guy from
Topeka who talks with a put-on British accent; Bobby Zinnaman's
knock-up of Ramblin' Jack Elliott in his emerging persona as Bob
Dylan). And some people may truly bridge or alternate membership
in more than one local group.
But the means that people use to identify themselves and others
are not likely to be "location of residence, income, sex, age,
education, occupation" and the like, but rather "subjective"
factors of body language, gesture, and dialect, the stuff of
creating and projecting a social face or persona. And people do
this to elicit and sustain cooperation, it seems to me. Just
because social psychology and sociology have often been inept
handmaidens of government (and employers), trying to keep their
hands aseptic and "objective", does not discredit social
groupings as something that people identify and identify with or
against.
Has anyone here read Deborah Tannen's work on manners of
speaking? _You Just Don't Understand_ is the most popular one,
on stereotypically male-female differences in conversational
style and problems that follow from them.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com