End of ADS-L Digest - 22 Dec 1993 to 23 Dec 1993

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There are 5 messages totalling 191 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. modren metathesis (3)

 2. new words at ads (2)



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Date:  Fri, 24 Dec 1993 18:40:21 +0700

From:  Gwyn Williams <gwyn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IPIED.TU.AC.TH>

Subject: Re: modren metathesis



 Interesting discussion. Interesting because linguists seem to spend more

time debating terminology than the phenonema that these terms label ;-)



On Thu, 23 Dec 1993 Rudy Troike <RTROIKE%ARIZVMS.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu>



>    Thanks for your confirmation. In thinking further about the topic I

>was reminded of the long-standing use of the term "primitive" in anthropology,

>which, no matter how ideologically relativistic anthropologists were, still

>resonated in the popular consciousness as "inferior"; we are still reaping the

>consequences of that reinforcement of racism by even well-meaning anthropolo-

>gists (leaving aside those who were willing agents of colonialism).



 Surely there have always been problems with how scholars use labels and

the popular use of these same labels? Terms in linguistics that spring to

mind are "linguist", "linguistics" (we've all had to explain that we _don't_

necessarily speak more than one language, right?), "language", "dialect",

"native", "grammatical" etc. I don't see any moves to replace these labels,

despite the confusion and misunderstanding that result.



> Using the

>term "mixing" to label any kind of multiple-code alternation is of the same

>order, unless there is clear clinical evidence that a speaker genuinely is

>not able to distinguish the two codes: if this were in fact true, the alter-

>nation would be predictably random, which it is not, except in the earliest

>stages of childhood bilingualism, in which various researchers have shown

>evidence that children have merged lexicons, with synonymous lexemes. This is

>normally a transient stage, however, before the codes are sorted out.



 So the term "mixing" should perhaps be retained as a tentative label until

we find out what is _actually_ going on?



 I see in postings a mixture <g> of performance and cognitive factors. My

understanding the topic is very superficial, but it seems to be more a

performance related term. Do we need to clarify what we're talking about?



>   To repeat for those recent to the discussion, most U.S. linguists use

>"code-switching" as a general term embracing code-alternation BETWEEN sentences

>and WITHIN sentences. The former is called INTER-SENTENTIAL code-switching,

>the latter INTRA-SENTENTIAL code-switching. While these are not particularly

>graceful terms, they are clear and consistent.



 Yes, thank you. They are descriptively more adequate. Intra-sentential

switching is at the lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels, right?



 But are inter-sentential and intra-sentential code-switching the same

phenonema? Are they simply a matter of degree, points on a spectrum? I find

the former very rare in Thai.



>.., "mixing" is absolutely the wrong term to use. It is

>interesting to observe that almost all of the people who use "mixing" are not

>native to U.S. society and have not had the kind of experience which would

>enable them to understand the pejorative social consequences of the term.



 Ah, now the truth comes out. It's an American hangup :-) So us "non-natives"

(the rest of the world) can continue to use the term, right?



Gwyn Williams

Thammasat University

Bangkok 10200

<gwyn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ipied.tu.ac.th>