[From: Bruce Nevin (Thu 930311 15:20:09)]
Continuing with (Bill Powers (930303.0830)), which was in
response to my (930302.1430) --
Some people think (almost always mistakenly) that the way to
entertain people around them is to tell jokes in dialect. They
may not achieve an entertained state in those who hear the joke,
but that is certainly the goal, and the correct explanation for
the way the joke-teller is pronouncing words at the moment. I
have observed that people who tell such jokes also perceive that
the others are entertained, which explains why they persist. They
perceive themselves in a social role that matches what they want
it to be; the others perceive something else, but their self-
images prevent them from being frank.
Are you sure that all the others present share your perceptions
of the situation. You are inveighing against the joke-teller's
delusion that he has privileged access into the perceptions of
those around him. Whence your privileged access here?
Specifically, how do you know that none of them is in fact
entertained and that all of them feel constrained by their self
images from being frank?
I assume that these are true statements about your experiences.
Why does your self image prevent you from being frank? Does it
have something to do with a relationship between how you imagine
you would be perceived by others if you were frank, on the one
hand, and how you want to be perceived by others, on the other
hand? What basis do you have for these expectations?
Are you sure that the joke teller is controlling for a perception
of "I am entertaining these people"? What else might he be
controlling for? It is almost always a he, isn't it? What might
that have to do with it? (Hint: look at the Tannen book I
mentioned.)
>And social dialect is an excellent index when you consider
>natives of a place like NYC, for example.
You can't run that logic both ways at once. If dialect is used to
identify the subpopulation, then you can't prove that there is
any shared characteristic other than the dialect, in which case
all you've shown is that some people speak with that dialect and
some don't. Either you pick the dialect as the discriminator, or
some other set of characteristics like living in the inner city.
To prove an association you'd have to show that not using the
dialect means you don't live in the inner city, or that living in
the inner city means that you have to speak with that dialect,
and the two converse cases. If ALL the cases don't prove out
every time, then all you've got is one of those statistical
generalizations that's true of a population but not of any
particular person. You certainly don't get any explanation for
why one person speaks in a particular dialect on a particular
occasion, and another doesn't.
In one study, Labov asked a large number of people a simple
informational question in a department store. He arranged it so
that it was a typical anonymous request for information, one on
one, attended to and quickly forgotten. He arranged it so that
the answer would display the speaker's pronunciation of a sound
with respect to which two NYC social-class dialects contrast.
For example, he asked sales clerks where a certain item was that
he knew was on the fourth floor, and they answered "fourth
floor." Then he went around the corner and recorded his
transcription of the diagnostic sounds (I think is was /o/ and
postvocalic /r/) for that person. In the lower-class department
store, he uniformly got one pronunciation, no exceptions; in the
upper-middle class department store he uniformly got the other
pronunciation, no exceptions.
Now, he might have encountered a lower-class person in the wrong store,
but in independent interviews they said they never shopped there
because they couldn't afford it and they felt out of place there,
so while shopping in the store cannot be ruled out for an
individual it is unlikely. Similarly for those who could afford
not to have to put up with the crowding and squalor and poor
quality merchandise of the lower-class store, and who
"coincidentally" all pronounced the other variant of the diagnostic
sound (no exceptions).
Here, I'll venture a prediction: no one reared through puberty in
a lower-class [an upper-class] family in NYC speaks an
upper-class [a lower-class] NYC dialect. The only assumption
here is that the way of talking have been learned in the usual
way, without formal study and tutilage in the manner of My Fair
Lady. In other words, apparent exceptions against which you
would forthwith no doubt love to rail will have made an unusual
and strenuous effort to learn the other dialect (and probably
have exceptional acting or linguistic talent or they'll botch the
attempt at mimicry). I don't know what the exceptional people
will have been controlling for, but it must have been very
important to them, because it's a lot of work. And even then,
let the telephone ring with an old buddy or family member on the
other end and something engaging to talk about, and effortful
deviation from norms learned in childhood are out the window.
Middle-class (upwardly mobile, downwardly vulnerable) seem to be
in some sense bi-dialectal, switching from one way of speaking to
the other depending upon circumstances and the attention they
give to how they are speaking. (See comments on Labov's somewhat
humorously named measure of linguistic insecurity.) But the
speech norms of middle-class people for formal talk are not
identical to the norms for upper-class speech, nor are their
norms for casual talk identical to the norms for lower-class
speech. They are norms to which middle-class speakers make their
speech conform. (They are closer to the norms of an earlier
generation of upper-class and lower-class speakers, respectively.)
People who moved around a lot in childhood (like myself)
obviously present a more complicated situation, and anyway fall
outside the above prediction.
Excuses, excuses. Let's face it: this way of
understanding people just doesn't work. So-called social strata
and groupings and norms exist mostly in the imagination of the
statistician. They are perceptual prejudices. If you pick any
individual at random and try to apply your generalization, you
will find that you need a dozen excuses to explain why this
person doesn't fit the category or behave like others whom you
put in the same category. When you finish with the excuses (none
of which is in fact investigated to see if it actually fits), all
you have done is to discard from your sample all the individuals
who don't fit the generalization. If you go through the
population person by person in this way, you may end up with
nobody left.
Seems to me you are flailing lots of straw around here. I'm not
over in that direction where you are attacking the statisticians
and the social determinists. I'm right here. Norms are not
products of statistical analysis. Nor is the behavior of humans
deterministically fixed by norms. For some norms (which appear
to be enforcedly subconscious for reasons discussed on other
occasions) people seem to choose to conform very closely. Under
exceptional conditions, such as hypnosis or intensive study and
practice, individuals may be able to shift to different norms.
Society, in my view, is a continuum in which individuals vary
along a hundred dimensions in ways independent of each other. Yet
the members of the society like to look at superficial secondary
characteristics like where one lives, how one dresses, how one
speaks, what one does for a living, what one says aloud about
beliefs, and so forth, and forms perceptions of groupings that
have almost nothing to do with what makes each person that person
and no other. Worst of all, the individuals then begin to deal
with others whom they see as sharing these apparent patterns of
secondary characteristics as if they were all right in the
middle, and all alike. The use of formal statistics to define
such groupings simply makes the prejudice harder to recognize for
what it is.
I agree with what I perceive as the basic thrust of all this.
Individuals participate in social patterning to varying degrees,
and by their participation constantly help to re-institute it.
Shared prejudice, and control of one's appearance with respect to
prejudices known to be shared, is a fact of social life. This
includes of course controlling so as to appear to defy or spurn
norms. Nonconformity typically depends upon the individual's
perception of normative patterning just as strongly as conformity
does, as indeed it must if it is to have an intended significance
to others. Utter carelessness of what one may signify to one's
fellows is I think beyond the scope of what we are considering,
and not so common.
But the prominent characteristics (or caricatures of
characteristics) that are the stuff of prejudices and shibboleths
are a small and misleading subset (or intersecting set) of social
norms. Are you aware of how much of your teeth you expose when
you smile? Upper or lower or both? There are consistent
regional differences.
I don't recall saying anything about formal statistics. Refresh
my memory if I did.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com