polyglot conspiracy

Even offline, the apostrophe is apparently a very salient mark of punctuation for some folks. Namely, folks in states that end in S who seek official policy to safeguard the possessive-marking apostrophe’s position between the word-final S and the possessive S. Legislation is being proposed:

Call it Arkansas’ apostrophe act - or, as Rep. Steve Harrelson would have it, “Arkansas’s apostrophe act.”

Harrelson filed a resolution Tuesday to declare the correct possessive form of the state as “Arkansas’s.” The resolution carries no legal weight, Harrelson acknowledged, but said a family friend who works as a historian asked him to carry the grammar fight to the floor.

“This is merely a favor,” said Harrelson, a Democrat. “He’s been asking me to do this for years and years.”

Rules on forming the possessive with the Natural State can be confusing. The Associated Press Stylebook calls for singular proper names ending in ’s’ to solely have an apostrophe. However, Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” calls for ” ’s,” unless using it with an ancient name.
…
After Arkansas became a state, confusion remained on its spelling and its pronunciation, as many maps from the time spelled it without its final “s.” A resolution by the Legislature in 1881 formalized its current spelling and pronunciation, making its final “s” silent.

“What they neglected to do is go one step farther and say what we’re saying now,” Westbrook said. To give the state a “possessive sound,” he said it should be spelled “Arkansas’s.”

If passed by the House, Harrelson said he’d seek a Senate sponsor for an identical measure there.

The non-binding resolution would not affect Arkansans’ use of apostrophes in Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts or neighboring Texas.

All fine and good, but saying “Arkansas’s” while looking at Arkansas’s is a little weird to me - I’m really driven to pronounce the final “s” just because of the possessive “s” being there, whereas normally I don’t pronounce it.

[hat tip to Dan]

Watched the Oscars last night. Am on spring break, so not really in blogging or doing-anything-mindful-at-all mode (hence watching the Oscars!), but realized something noteworthy: How weird is it that there is a category for Foreign Language Film, yet when they read the list of nominees, it tells you the country the nominated films are from, not the lanugage that the film is made in? So, this year, there were After the Wedding, from Denmark; Days of Glory (Indigenes), from Algeria; The Lives of Others, from Germany; Pan’s Labyrinth, from Mexico; Water, from Canada.

I think it’s very strange that what makes a difference for whether a film can get into this award category isn’t apparently actually where these films are from, but the fact that they are not in English. Yet the way they are presented, we’re not told what language they are in, we’re just told where they’re from. So this makes it seem like somehow the languages should be matching up neatly with the countries the movies are from, which of course doesn’t always find a tight match (who would presume that a Canadian film wasn’t made in English [I think this would be the de facto assumption--that Canadian=English]; and haven’t lots of English-language films been made in other countries?). Also, what about American-made films that aren’t in English? Letters from Iwo Jima was (I have gathered) in Japanese, yet it was nominated for Best Picture. So the category seems to be aimed toward non-American films, not strictly non-English films, in which case the category’s title, indicating that language spoken is to be the defining criterion for the category, is a misnomer.

I gave a short talk yesterday at our sociolinguistics discussion group, which held a student panel called Media as a Source of Data for Sociolinguistic Inquiry. Since a few of my colleagues are doing some very cool stuff with regards to media and language, it seemed an appropriate topic, and since I don’t have anything I’m actually working on newly right now, data-wise, but I’m obviously interested in the topic, I (was) volunteered to introduce the topic. Not having anything else to post about, I thought I’d post the talk here: consider it a general glance into my world-view.

——-
Media and Sociolinguistics

I’m going to talk about some loosely theoretical issues about the potential intersection between media and sociolinguistics, trying not to be too abstract. I want to work from a very basic level, asking: what is media, what is sociolinguistics, and how can we put them together? Anna, Brook, and Rizwan [my awesome colleagues!] are going to talk about specific media and how they utilize them in their research, but I hope to paint a more general picture of how these two entities can be engaged.

A few years ago, I gave a paper at an internet research conference, to an audience largely of sociologists and communication scholars. The paper was about the range of different communication technologies that people can use to talk to one another, and I was seeking to understand how people conceptualize conversations held in different venues. I drew a comparative distinction in my project between “mediated” communication, encompassing talk through the telephone, text messaging, email, instant messaging, and so forth, and “unmediated” communication, meaning face-to-face. At the end of my paper, I got a pointed comment from an audience member [revealed: Bernie Hogan]. He said, “There is no such thing as ‘unmediated’ communication. You can’t say that ‘face to face’ is unmediated. Everything is mediated.” I did not have a good response, so I told him we should perhaps argue about his point later.

But ultimately, he was right: nothing in social interaction is unmediated. As sociolinguists we inherently recognize this, and this is in fact a lot of what sets our research apart from that of other subfields of linguistics. We analyze linguistic patterns in terms of the complex non-linguistic influences upon them: social categories, desire for social differentiation or sameness, individual style, ideologies, history. We view all of these things as mediating everyday discourse and, therefore, linguistic patterns. Yet when we say “media,” it’s obviously something different, seemingly more removed from language, which mediates things more explicitly, more palpably, and even more influentially than slippery social properties do.

What seems different about media and these other mediators is exactly the material that is involved: the stuff we’re dealing with. This may seem obvious, but I think it’s worth pointing out, because it indicates that there are always multiple layers of mediation at any moment of discourse, which sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists are starting to do a good job of teasing apart.
Language and media have something very essential in common: they’re both material things. We often think of language as being either “in here” (in the head, if you’re a syntactician) or “out there” (in the speech community, if you’re an anthropologist). But as it is produced, language comprises bits of material - usually sound, but often visual things as well, as in the case of writing systems. We’re more likely to talk about media as material than language as material, yet implicit in any analysis of linguistic variables, for instance, is that there’s some kind of material thing that we can isolate in order to study it or people’s reactions to it. This material forms our repertoire of available linguistic and semiotic resources, which we deploy to create both propositional and social meaning.

So to talk about language as it occurs in or through media, is to talk about materials coming together, sets of material resources and constraints on combining them, as well as affordances offered by their combination. Using media as a source of data means we have to consider material separate from but related to the linguistic material. We have to consider how the two forms of material interact.

I’m using a pretty loose definition here of what “media” is, which is intentional, because I often struggle myself to figure out what the difference is between “media,” a “medium,” “mediated” or “mediator,” and “the media”? I tend to think of “media” very broadly as “technologies that mediate,” and in the case of sociolinguistic research, “technologies that mediate discourse.” This broadens our scope beyond what we think of as “mass media,” and includes a very wide variety of technologies: paper, phone, computers, the internet, television, magazines, compact discs, and so on.

We also tend to think of media as public, that which is broadcast from one person or entity to an unknown and unquantifiable audience. Yet especially with the rise of the internet and interactive media, we can get rid of the idea that “media” is necessarily “public,” and moreover that audiences are necessarily unknown. Though it’s certainly not true in every society, each of us here in this room uses several forms of media every day to talk to people, sometimes privately, sometimes publicly. At the same time, we consume media that is produced by others - our friends, our colleagues, newspapers and TV shows. We are, more and more, media producers as well as consumers.

But still, why should linguists care about media or the media? Well, we can talk about media qua media, which directly engages questions of genre, where a researcher might say, “I am interested in interaction via webchat,” or “I am interested in what dialect newscasters use.” We can also talk about the media qua linguistic venue, in which media is very narrowly construed as a channel, and here we might say something more like, “I am interested in the social meaning of dialect features, and newscasts are where I will find my speech data.” In either case, we have to take into account where the media is coming from, and what the technology is contributing to the linguistic patterns we find. That is, we cannot get around the question of their context. This is what I think is most important about media for us - it’s where we see very obviously that language can’t be separated from the context in which it is produced and received: either the material or the social context. Media is both reflective and constitutive of cultural and social patterns, just as language is.

Relatedly, I see three key concerns that emerge anytime one is using media as a source of linguistic data, or examining language as it occurs through media:

1) What is the frame of the media, and how does it frame its messages? Media come with readymade frames for discourse, categorizing information before anything linguistic is involved. We want to know how linguistic patterns fit into, and help to create, those frames.

2) Who are the producer and audience for the media, and how do they directly or indirectly shape the messages and interpretations? Media is always created for an audience, and even in seemingly non-interactive mass media, the audience is engaged in a process of dialogue with the media. The influence is mutual.

3) What is the media representing, and is representation its goal or its byproduct? We might be interested in using radio broadcasts to examine local dialects, but we have to understand that we’re getting from our data not just a dialect or set of features, full stop, but a dialect as represented in a certain way, whether intentionally packaged or not. This relates back to the issue of frame, as well.

I would argue that these three questions are critical to understanding any discourse or interaction, but having discourse as framed by media perhaps brings them to greater salience. We should want to understand the processes that relate these issues, and that relate them to linguistic practice.
With these questions in mind, let me end with a caveat about using media as data sources. I often see researchers, and this is especially prevalent in the case of internet-produced data, using media as data sources simply because it’s convenient: IRB approval isn’t necessary, the data comes already archived, the format is easier to deal with than field notes or spontaneous recordings. But I want to emphasize that to view media only as a “source” of data isn’t adequate; that the media is in some sense also the data. I’m not suggesting that the medium is the message, of course, but that media inevitably shapes the message in some way – just as do social relationships, identities, and settings. Thus, it’s important for sociolinguists to analyze media materials in concert with linguistic ones, not just because it’s easy for us to use them, but because our speakers use them as part of their social worlds. They are implicated in meaning-making processes, with and through linguistic practice.

First, a lesson about Wikipedia: not everything goes, truly. No, really! Look at what Masters of Media has to say:

In a couple of the previous posts on MoM we announced that we were adding the term ‘Shocklog’ to the English Wikipedia. Why? Well, the term is used often in the field of Media Studies and genre specific blogs need to have a name. But since last week our entry has been removed (again). Wikipedia doesn’t allow neologisms and because shock + log = neologism, there will be no shocklog entry on Wikipedia.

It’s patently untrue that Wikipedia doesn’t allow neologisms, full stop. But, apparently there is some question about at what point a neologism becomes valuable enough (I’m going with a words as currency analogy, here) to be included in the encyclopedia. Is it when a bunch of scholars decide to start using it? How many published sources are enough? Do they have to be published, or can the word just be circulating around online? And, as discussion on the moderation site for the word indicates, does it have to be in use in English-as-primary-language countries (if it’s being posted on the .en Wikipedia), or can it be used elsewhere? In this case, the argument comes from the fact that the word is widely-known in the Netherlands, and it got removed because the moderating Americans (or maybe Brits?) didn’t know it. Commenter defending the word’s inclusion says:

“To our surprise the term shocklog, a wellknown term in the Netherlands, was nowhere to be found on the rest of the World Wide Web. We wanted that to change, so we -The Masters of Media- coined the term on a new English Wikipedia entry.”

To which someone said, “So you want to coin the term by putting it on Wikipedia?!” Talk about a performative!

Anyway, the moral? Wikipedia is way more like traditional encyclopedias than it wants to think it is, and that the press likes to think it is. The public ultimately decides on similar norms as the privately-vetted media they’re used to. Imagine that: entrainment.

Second, there’s a pretty horrifying case just made public wherein a mother in Austria kept her three daughters locked in a filthy home for 7 years:

The girls were shut away from the outside world, existing in almost complete darkness, playing only with mice and communicating in their own language.

When they were discovered, their home in a smart, upper middle-class suburb had no running water and was filled with waste and excrement a metre high. The floor was corroded by mice urine.

The case has stunned Austria, still reeling from the Natascha Kampusch kidnapping, and the authorities were struggling last night to explain how such a horror story could have gone unnoticed.

This is completely disgusting, but of course anytime children are shut away for years or people are deprived of human interaction for any significant period of time, people interested in language get all frothy with excitement. So here’s what (little) the article says about it (note: the girls were 7, 11, and 13 when the sequesterment began):

It is believed that the children had contact only with their mother during the seven years of captivity and, as a consequence, developed an almost unintelligible language of their own, described as a “singing-like” form of German.

Even after a year of therapy the oldest daughter, Elisabeth, now 21, is said to be so disturbed that she stands only on one foot for long periods staring at the floor. She often bursts into tears.

She and her two sisters also reportedly finish all sentences with the word “but”.

The fact that some noticeably different form of German would have resulted is unsurprising; since the girls all presumably had language skills before being shut off from contact with others, their existent patterns would somehow likely have converged. What is kind of weird here is this finishing all sentences with “but” (which I assume is really aber). Any ideas about what is going on here? Is it like there’s always an implicit coordinate clause there? Is it like they always don’t know what else to say? Is it simply some form of hedge? Is it simply a discourse marker meaning “end of sentence”? Is it even true?

Why didn’t anyone ever guess my proposed hink pink? It’s really easy. Someone guess. I feel unresolved.

1) I heard back from Jonathan Visgr of Mason Proper:

i said:

“Anything is possible, though we don’t do any–mmmmany–covers… I FINALLY thought of one today I might like to try, but with covers I feel it’s so important that A) it is very different from the original and B) it is, at least ARGUABLY, better than the original.”

i realized as soon as i said the word “any” that it was not true, so i paused, closed one eye and tilted my head, then slowly and painstakingly pronounced “many” with an extra long “m” at the beginning. i would suggest that while i’m sure i emphasized those words a little, the effect of the capitalization is a little dramatic for the subtle volume increase i probably applied.

i’ve looked over the interview again, and there are a few other liberties that have been taken with it in the editing process, but i’m comfortable with the results so i’m not going to stress the matter. i’ve been represented far less accurately in the past. nothing like an off-hand remark turned into a lofty and obnoxious statement by having the context stripped out.

So there it was, it was option (b). Still, the choice to write what he said as one word with a textual convention for indicating uncertainty is very strange, and here really makes it seem like the interview perhaps wasn’t F2F, as Mike pointed out in a comment to the previous post. It seems no longer conversational and is actually a bit jarring.

If you encounter anything like this in the future - where something that was probably spoken but then transcribed/published using the affordances of written text - send it my way! I’m very interested in this stuff. Other examples coming to mind are “s/he,” “ragazz@,” and anything where spelling is altered to indicate a different tone or pronunciation (hottt). The latter seems far less likely, but therefore would be especially interesting.

Oh - also, Visgr mentioned that he would’ve felt it was slightly more accurate about the interpretation had the caps lock-ed words been italicized instead, so it seemed like they were merely emphatic, not shouting (he claims not to have been shouting, and I believe him).

2) In other news and notes, yesterday on News & Notes (NPR), there was an interesting discussion about Joe Biden’s remark about Barack Obama being “articulate.” Basically, the host and guests say that calling a black man “articulate” is paramount to saying that he’s “articulate…for a black person.” This was especially interesting to me because in semantics the other day we were talking about implicit comparison classes, which are there (say some people) anytime you use a modifier (adjective). So, when I say “My cat is big,” it means something like, “My cat is big (for a cat).” “This blog has a lot of readers” = “This blog has a lot of readers (for a linguistics blog that isn’t Language Hat, Language Log, Semantic Compositions, or the Tensor).” “You’re a great dancer” = “You’re a great dancer (for a white girl).”* The idea is that when you claim that something possesses a quality, you have in mind that it possesses it relative to other things like it, or other things that are capable of possessing the quality. What this amounts to saying, says *I*, is that you can never make a simply qualitative statement; you can’t make any abstract modifications. I find this silly, both because it makes a cognitive claim that I don’t find plausible, and because it’s circular, and because it implies that meanings of “quality”-type modifiers [I don't know the technical term for this...semantics n00b!] are ultimately contingent on the kinds of things they can modify, and this seems odd. But anyway.

The “articulate” scenario shows that implicit comparison classes, if they’re there, obviously get brought to salience sometimes (i.e., “for a black person”). Even if they’re not made explicit, their implication is more explicit than in most cases. I wonder what the cultural or discursive conditions are that trigger overt recognition, or perhaps simply evocation, of the comparison class? It would seem to depend on the relative prominence or controversy of the comparison class itself, rather than the modifier. And if that’s true, then anything you use to modify the class takes a meaning depending on the class itself, not the modifier; furthermore, the class gets inserted even when the speaker doesn’t intend the implication. Another example: “Hillary Clinton is smart” = “Hillary Clinton is smart (for a woman).” If I say this, I could mean that Hillary Clinton is smart for a politician, or for a Wellesley grad, or for a 50-something-year-old, or someone could have asked for an exemplar of smartness, and I said that Hillary Clinton is one.

Except that in these situations, I don’t control my comparison class. I’m forced, by underlying social relationships/structures/beliefs, to have my intention be interpreted as the controversial comparison class, and the modification is thereby interpreted in terms of social stereotypes of the class. I lose control over my modification. How does this all work? Does it mean that any time someone says that a black man is articulate or a woman is smart or a man is a good cook or a white girl is a good dancer, it’ll be interpreted relative to the comparison class that’s a) relevant, and b) the most heavily stereotyped? Does it mean that anytime someone says one of these things they DO secretly imply the comparison class?

I can’t finish this thought, because my brain hurts and I’m running late. Oh well, this is already fairly long (for a blog post).

*has been said to me

A great Michigan rock band, Mason Proper, has a recent interview with CMJ. It seems to have been taken from a normal face-to-face interview:

We recently caught up with Mason Proper after their NYC show at Piano’s this past Wednesday. Their front man, Jonathan Visgr, let us steal some of his time to chat about the band’s live show…

Yet, I’m baffled by the following paragraph:

CMJ: Any possible cover of the Cure’s “100 Years” in the meantime?

JV: Anything is possible, though we don’t do (m)any covers… I FINALLY thought of one today I might like to try, but with covers I feel it’s so important that A) it is very different from the original and B) it is, at least ARGUABLY, better than then original.

What is going on with this (m)any? There are several textual devices in this sentence that seem to have direct parallels in the speech stream: the capital letters are no doubt representing Visgr’s emphasis on those words, and perhaps he actually said “A” and “B” as ways to outline his points as he spoke. But this (m)any? How would one speak this concept of the optional first letter (and what do we call this sort of portmanteau-indicating-ambiguity)? I can think of three explanations.

a. Visgr said something that sounded like he wasn’t sure whether he was going to say “many” or “any,” so it sounded something like “m…any.”

b. Visgr said either “any” or “many,” then went back and corrected himself, and the interviewer edited it to be more succinct in the text.

c. Fluke: the interviewer couldn’t tell whether he said “many” or “any,” so in his notes had written the ambiguous version and never changed it in the final product, or he had written the ambiguous version in the final product and never did the final “does this sound like what he was really saying?” edit.

d. Visgr actually used air parentheses (with his hands) around the M as he spoke.

I really hope it’s (d), but I’ll entertain other possibilities. What strikes me about this is that if it’s anything other than airquotes, I’d bet that this interviewer/writer has been influenced by textual practice (using slashes or parentheses to create ambiguous portmanteaus [ok I really need a better word for this!]), which has become more common and visible with the internet, and applying it to transcribing people’s spoken words. What I can’t imagine is, what would SOUND in such a way that someone would transcribe (m)any? It’s like, how would someone ever say s/he?

[I've messaged Mason Proper to ask Visgr whether he remembers what he said during the interview at this point. No word yet; I'll update if appropriate. You reading this, Visgr? I wasn't kidding about really wanting to know the answer.]