Taming the Vernacular

From dialect to written standard language

Jenny Cheshire, Dieter Stein, Jenny Cheshire, Dieter Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317885795
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Taming the Vernacular: From Dialect to Written Standard Language examines the differences between 'standard' and 'nonstandard' varieties of several different languages. Not only are some of the best-known languages of Europe represented here, but also some that have been less well-researched in the past.
The chapters address the syntax of Dutch, English, French, Finnish, Galician, German and Spanish. For these languages, and many others, it is the standard varieties on which the most extensive syntactic research has been carried out, with the result that very little is known about the syntax of their dialects or the spoken colloquial varieties.

The editors of this volume seek to redress the balance by taking a cross-linguistic perspective on the historical development of the standardised varieties. This allows them to identify some common characteristics of spoken language. It also helps the reader to understand the kinds of filtering processes that are involved in standardization, which result in the syntax of spoken colloquial language being different from the syntax of the standard varieties.

Taming the Vernacular: From Dialect to Written Standard Language is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Linguistics, particularly those taking courses in sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics. The focus on a variety of languages also makes this text suitable for students studying courses which cover the linguistic aspects of European languages.

CHAPTER 1

The syntax of spoken language

Jenny Cheshire and Dieter Stein

1.1 Introduction

The chapters in this volume deal with the syntax of some present-day spoken varieties of language. Some of the best-known languages of Europe are represented here, as well as some that have been less well researched: between them the papers deal with Dutch, English, French, Finnish, Galician, German and Spanish. For these languages – and many others – it is the standardized varieties on which the most extensive syntactic research has been carried out, with the result that we know far less about the syntax of the other varieties of these languages. The cross-linguistic perspective that we adopt in this volume allows us to redress the balance and identify some common characteristics of the syntax of spoken language; we intend it also to help us understand the nature of the processes that are responsible for many of the differences between spoken colloquial varieties of language and the standardized varieties.

It is helpful for the languages represented in this volume to think of each of them as a continuum, with the syntactic forms that occur in formal written prose at one end of the continuum and the forms that we can recognize as occurring only in vernacular speech at the other end. In between these two poles is a range of syntactic forms and structures which occur in speech, some of which are conventionally considered as ‘colloquial’ by commentators on language while others tend to be labelled as ‘dialect’ or ‘nonstandard’. Linguists often try to give these terms more precision. Thus they may label as ‘dialect’ features those that have a distinctive social or regional distribution (or both); and ‘colloquial’ features may be defined as those that occur in the informal speech styles of all speakers of the language, irrespective of their social or regional background. It is more difficult to precisely define ‘nonstandard’ features. To categorise a feature as ‘nonstandard’ is to treat it as if it has a ‘standard’ equivalent, but whilst we may know what the standard equivalent is for some morphological features (such as English was in we was going out or hisself in he hurt hisself), the general concept of a ‘standard’ in language has never been clearly and satisfactorily defined, and it is very difficult to do so. It is probably more realistic to think in terms of the process of standardisation rather than of a standard language (see Milroy and Milroy 1985) and, as the last three chapters in this volume argue, it may well be more revealing to simply analyse the syntactic variation that exists in a language without imposing labels such as ‘nonstandard’, ‘dialect’ or ‘colloquial’ on the variant forms and structures. Nevertheless these labels continue to be widely used in linguistic description.

Despite their widespread use, and despite attempts to give precise definitions for them, the borderline between colloquial, dialect and nonstandard often remains fuzzy. This can be seen from the ways in which some of the contributors to this volume refer to their spoken data. Some use the term ‘nonstandard’ syntax, while others prefer ‘dialect syntax’; still others simply refer to spoken syntax. The situation is made more complex still by the fact that once a written syntactic form of a language has been established, some speakers use the standardized syntactic forms in their speech, so that it becomes possible to talk of a ‘spoken standard’. This point is made quite explicitly by van Marie in Chapter 2, where he describes how the standard may originate as a written variety and then come to serve as a norm for spoken language as well, at least for some speakers of the language. We have not attempted to impose a uniform terminology on the authors, as the kind of data that they are discussing is clear in their chapters: furthermore, since we are dealing with a continuum there is little point in attempting to impose divisions that would inevitably be arbitrary. The third chapter in the volume, by Stein, discusses further the idea of a continuum and the notion of a standard variety. In the remainder of this introductory chapter we will mainly use the term ‘vernacular’ syntax to refer to those features that are uncontroversially not part of the established standard: in other words, if we think in terms of a continuum, as mentioned earlier, we mean by ‘vernacular’ those features that are situated at some distance from the formal written pole, and more towards the vernacular spoken pole. We will also use the terms ‘nonstandardized syntax’ and ‘spoken syntax’ without attempting to distinguish between them. Our different terms reflect the arbitrariness of attempting to categorise fuzzy phenomena; but they refer, in all cases, to linguistic features that are not used in formal written prose.

1.2 Data on spoken syntax

The chapters in this volume are all written by researchers who have worked extensively on spoken language. In general, however, there is a sorry lack of empirical data on the syntax of speech. One of the aims of this volume is to redress the balance, but it is nevertheless worth discussing in some detail the reasons for our lack of knowledge, since, if we are to increase our understanding of this topic, future researchers obviously need to overcome any problems there might be in the collection and analysis of this type of data.

To begin with, it is clear that the study of vernacular syntax suffers from the same methodological problems as the study of any kind of syntax: the relatively infrequent occurrences of the specific syntactic features that are being investigated. To some extent this problem is already being overcome by the availability of large-scale corpora of spoken language, which can yield large numbers of tokens of specific syntactic forms; but so far these corpora consist mainly of the speech of people who might be expected to use forms close to the written standard end of the continuum, and corpus linguistics has not yet produced much information about vernacular syntax.

A further reason for the lack of information on vernacular syntax is that most studies that have focused specifically on nonstandardized forms of language – in dialectology, for example – have analysed phonology rather than syntax. This is partly because the dialects are spoken varieties and obviously call for an analysis of their sound structure. It is also, however, because of the special attention that prescriptive grammarians have paid to syntax during the process of standardization. Syntax is the first aspect of language to be commented upon in terms of correctness and the first whose forms are subjected to evaluative categorisations into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ – even before the onset of standardization proper (Stein 1994). Standardization has always gone hand in hand with an increasing use of written language; and written language is accompanied by a tendency for uniformity in language. For readers syntax cannot fail to register as a massive signal that hits the eye directly. The standard syntactic forms are constantly in the limelight, because of the attention that is given to ‘correct’ grammar in writing and then, by extension, in speech. For all these reasons the syntax of a language comes to be identified with the syntax of the standard variety by laypeople and sometimes even by linguists too. Thus, whereas for dialects it was the phonology that was self-evidently of interest, for standard varieties it is the syntax that has been more extensively studied – despite the importance of the nonstandardized varieties for our understanding of language structure, as van Marie argues.

An additional reason for the lack of attention to vernacular syntax lies in the theoretical conceptions of language that have held sway during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When dialectology was paramount in linguistics, during the nineteenth century, the study of syntax was under-developed and the necessary analytical tools were not yet ready. During the structuralist period, in roughly the first half of the twentieth century, mainstream linguists operated with an intrinsically unitary concept of language rather than a variety-based concept. During the second half of the twentieth century generative linguists have pursued this view with a vengeance, with researchers analysing their intuitions about their own idiolect, implying, therefore, that syntax is homogeneous. Furthermore, since linguists are inevitably highly-educated academics their idiolects are probably more influenced by the norms of written language than those of any other speakers. Sociolinguists too have done relatively little to advance the study of syntax. They have, it is true, succeeded in putting the analysis of variation in language onto a proper scientific footing, but they began with the analysis of phonological variation and then became bogged down in wrangles about whether or not it is possible to use the same methods of analysis for syntactic variation (see, for example, Lavandera 1978, Labov 1978, Romaine 1980, Cheshire 1987). The result is that there is still no linguistic theory that explicitly addresses the theoretical status of nonstandard versus standard varieties, nor that considers the extent to which the standard and nonstandard varieties should be considered to be part of a single linguistic system.

Yet another explanation for the lack of research on vernacular syntax is the emphasis in applied linguistic research on the standard language, which of course has always been the target variety in language learning and teaching. This emphasis is beginning to change a little as language learners and teachers become more interested in social and regional varieties of the target language (see, for example, Hughes and Trudgill 1987, a book designed to provide for learners of English as a foreign language some phonological and grammatical descriptions of several social and regional varieties of English). There is an awareness among schoolteachers – if not always among policy makers – of the educational implications of social and regional variation for the teaching of the native language (see, for example, the papers in Cheshire et al. 1989; see also, for English, Cheshire and Edwards 1993). On the whole, however, the descriptions of language that have been produced as reference grammars, pedagogic grammars and teaching manuals have been heavily biased towards the written standard, and this has contributed not only to the development of teaching models that are oriented towards the written language but also to the kind of images of language that dominate within society.

In historical linguistics, also, the syntax of the vernacular has been neglected, at least from the point in time when a standard can be said to have come into existence (thus, for English, this means between 1600 and 1800). From that point on, studying the ‘history’ of a language has usually meant dealing only with the standard variety, and historical research has traditionally paid little or no further attention to the dialects of the language. This has been termed the ‘single-minded march’ towards the standard (Lass 1994, Stein 1994). For example, Baugh and Cable’s much-used A History of the English Language states that the English pronoun forms thou and thee are in ordinary use today only among the Quakers (1978: 242), overlooking their survival in the everyday use of speakers of conservative regional varieties of English (for discussion, see Leith and Graddol 1996). Only very recently have dialects been put on the agenda once more for historical linguistics. By leaving out non-standardized syntax from the study of the history of a language we make it impossible to relate present-day dialect forms to past dialect forms, and to establish historical continuities within the language as a whole. The dominant perspectives in historical linguistics, then, like the dominant perspectives in theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics, have tended to prevent us from seeing the structural make-up and structural possibilities of the whole spectrum of variation that makes up a language, and have led us instead to think in terms only of the standard.

1.3 Recurrent themes in this volume

For all these reasons it is impossible to consider non-standardized syntax other than in relation to standardized syntax – as the term suggests – and it is not surprising, therefore, that the dialectic between ‘standard’ and ‘nonstandard’ comes into play in all the chapters in this volume.

Chapters 2 and 3 make similar points, albeit in different ways and with different illustrative examples. Both van Marie and Stein set out general principles that can explain the absence of dialect or extreme colloquial forms from the written standard, and vice-versa. The examples in these two chapters are taken from Dutch, German and English: other chapters in the volume show that many of these points apply equally to other languages. It is striking that the same kinds of filtering processes that Stein describes, which prevent certain syntactic forms from becoming part of the standard, operate on languages that are very different typo-logically and that have very different histories of standardization. For example, German is an inflectional language and Finnish even more so, whereas English is more analytic; yet similar filtering processes are at work in all three. Again, English has had a standard elaborated variety for about three centuries, Finnish for a single century at most, and Galician is still acquiring a standard: yet here too we can observe similarities in the construction of the standardized syntax of each language.

One of the principles discussed by Stein concerns the sélection of syntactic forms as suitable for the written standard on the basis of their being audibly and visibly distinct from spoken language. We can see the operation of this principle very clearly in Vilkuna’s contribution (Chapter 4), which shows that a clause-combining particle that is perfectly normal in spoken Finnish has now disappeared from the written standard, in which it had once been accepted. Vilkuna explains this as having nothing to do with the intrinsic syntactic structure of the language: it is simply that the particle has its origins in spoken language, where it fulfils several important functions appropriate for the spontaneity of face-to-face communication. These functions meant that the particle was not selected as part of standard Finnish, and they are ignored by present-day Finnish linguists. The chapter by Cheshire shows that the same kind of selection process has been at work during the standardization of English.

A second principle discussed in Stein’s chapter is the stripping off of emotive meanings from forms that become associated with the written standard. These meanings are unnecessary and deemed inappropriate in formal essayist writing. This is well illustrated in Chapter 6, in which Melchers describes a more elaborated three-part system of deixis that existed in Middle English and continues to exist in some English dialects. The nonstandardized system has much greater potential for expressing affective meaning and this, together with its association with the types of meanings typically expressed by speakers rather than by writers, seems to account for the system not having become part of the written standard. In Chapter 5, Cheshire also illustrates this principle, showing how for two separate features of English syntax the affective meanings that serve to create involvement in face-to-face communication have been banned from the standard, even though this means forgoing a richer potential for expressing interpersonal meaning. Several other authors in the volume also mention interpersonal involvement or the expression of affective meaning as a factor evident in nonstandardized syntax, including Schlieben-Lange (Chapter 9) for German, Kabatek (Chapter 13) for Galician, and Laitinen (Chapter 8) for Finnish.

The syntax of the standard variety often seems to result from an explicit attempt by grammarians to tidy up the inherent fuzziness and indeterminacy of spoken syntax. This sometimes makes a structure more amenable to systematic description, but at the same time it becomes impossible to describe and explain the precise nature of that structure. Rohdenburg (Chapter 7) shows how the syntax of a spoken variety can be heavily influenced by the phonology, giving examples from a North German dialect. The result is that the syntax cannot be described in its own terms, and anyone who attempts to do so will have to give a ‘messy’ description, incompatible with the aims of linguists attempting to write descriptive gram...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1. The syntax of spoken language
• 2. Dialect versus standard language: nature versus culture
• 3. Syntax and varieties
• 4. Into and out of the standard language: the particle ni in Finnish
• 5. Involvement in ‘standard‘ and ‘nonstandard‘ English
• 6. This, that, yon: on ‘three-dimensional’ deictic systems
• 7. Grammatical variation and the avoidance of stress clashes in Northern Low German
• 8. Norms made easy: case marking with modal verbs in Finnish
• 9. Articles and number in oral or close-to-oral varieties
• 10. Proscribed collocations with shall and will: the eighteenth century (non-)standard reassessed
• 11. The genitives of the relative pronouns in present-day English
• 12. ‘Ah'm going for to give youse a story today’: remarks on second person plural pronouns in Englishes
• 13. Strengthening identity: differentiation and change in contemporary Galician
• 14. Left dislocation in French: varieties, norm and usage
• 15. Dialect variation as a consequence of standardization
• 16. The patternings of nonstandard syntax in German
• Index