Professor Jane Hodson What is metalanguage Metalanguage is talk about talk It is what happens when language is not just the means of communication but also the topic of communication ID: 694665
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Slide1
Metalanguage: Talk about Talk
Professor Jane
HodsonSlide2
What is metalanguage?
Metalanguage
is “talk about talk”
It is what happens when language is not just the
means
of communication, but also the
topic
of communication
.
‘Do you speak English?’,
‘I don’t like your tone!’
‘What I meant to say was …’
‘Speaker A shows consistent TH-fronting.’Slide3
Metalanguage happens a lot …
Anderson
et
al.
(2004) found that people indeed resort to meta-language quite frequently in natural conversations:
11.47% of the utterances they looked at
were identified as containing
meta-language
(p. 2).
Similar
results were reported by
Aukrust
(2004), who examined adult-child interaction during mealtimes in American and Norwegian
famiies
, revealing that "on average as much as every tenth utterance commented on talk" (p. 189).
Julian
Stude
(2007) p. 199Slide4
Metalanguage is often ideologicalMetalinguistic representations may enter public consciousness and come to constitute structured understandings, perhaps even ‘common sense’ understandings – of how language works, what it is usually like, what certain ways of speaking connote and imply, what they
ought
to be like. That is, metalanguage can work at an ideological level and influence people’s actions and prioritise in a wide range of ways, some clearly visible and others much less so. (
Jaworski
,
Coupland
and
Galasinski 2004)
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2 basic flavours of metalanguage:The academic discipline of linguistics is a
specialised
form
of
metalanguage, based on the principle that all varieties of language are equally valid. (Descriptivism)
Outside academia, people are more familiar with a more popular metalanguage, based on the principle that some language varieties are better than others. (Prescriptivism)
http
://www.asandiford.com/tag/prescriptivism/
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For many years I have been disgusted with the bad grammar used by school-leavers and teachers too sometimes, but recently on the lunchtime news, when a secretary who had just started work with a firm, was interviewed her first words were: ‘I looked up and seen two men’ etc. It’s unbelievable to think, with so many young people out of work, that she could get such a job, but perhaps ‘I seen’ and ‘I done’ etc. is the usual grammar nowadays for office staff and business training colleges.
(
Letter in a local paper,
cited in
Milroy & Milroy 1999: 38)Slide7
[...] it is in the interplay between usage and social evaluation that much of the social "work" of language - including pressures towards social integrations and division, and the policing of social boundaries generally - is done. (
Jaworski
,
Coupland
and
Galasinski
, 2004, p. 3-4)Slide8
My own researchHistorical literary linguistics Dialect in Film and Literature
The history of Prescriptivism
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8Slide9
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9
Tom-All-
Alone's
(2012) Lynn Shepherd
He knows the voice; has known it, in fact, these five years and more. The girl standing behind him is tiny and her impish features heavily made-up, but there’s life and real affection in the bright green eyes. She’s arranged in an expensive and extremely fashionable combination of ruby satin and white lace that clashes jauntily with her anything but expensive accent. Though as Charles well knows, she can mimic the gentry to perfection when it suits her – in fact this talent of hers has been more than a little useful to him in the past.
[…]
“I got your message,” the girl says now with a smile, before looking up in his face and sensing his unease. “
Somefing
up, Charlie?”
“It’s cold out here, Lizzie, do you want a drink
?”
She shakes her head. “The old hag is watching us – see? Over there,
pretendin
’ to look in the shop
winda
?” (153)Slide10
A brief history of the study of dialect literature
Authenticity – is this an accurate representation of a real world dialect?
Fictolinguistics
- what is this dialect doing with the world of the
text?
Integrated - how does the dialect representation interact with
real-world understandings of language variation??
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10Slide11
Can you identify:where there is direct representation of a non-standard voicewhere there is metalinguistic commentary on that non-standard voice
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12
Tom-All-
Alone's
(2012) Lynn Shepherd
He knows the voice; has known it, in fact, these five years and more. The girl standing behind him is tiny and her impish features heavily made-up, but there’s life and real affection in the bright green eyes. She’s arranged in an expensive and extremely fashionable combination of ruby satin and white lace that clashes jauntily with her anything but expensive accent. Though as Charles well knows, she can mimic the gentry to perfection when it suits her – in fact this talent of hers has been more than a little useful to him in the past.
[…]
“
I got your message
,” the girl says now with a smile, before looking up in his face and sensing his unease. “
Somefing
up, Charlie
?”
“It’s cold out here, Lizzie, do you want a drink
?”
She shakes her head. “
The old hag is watching us – see? Over there,
pretendin
’ to look in the shop
winda
?”Slide13
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13
Tom-All-
Alone's
(2012) Lynn Shepherd
He knows the voice; has known it, in fact, these five years and more
. The girl standing behind him is tiny and her impish features heavily made-up, but there’s life and real affection in the bright green eyes. She’s arranged in
an expensive and extremely fashionable combination of ruby satin and white lace that clashes jauntily with her anything but expensive accent
. Though as Charles well knows,
she can mimic the gentry to perfection when it suits her – in fact this talent of hers has been more than a little useful to him in the past
.
[…]
“
I got your message
,” the girl says now with a smile, before looking up in his face and sensing his unease. “
Somefing
up, Charlie
?”
“It’s cold out here, Lizzie, do you want a drink
?”
She shakes her head. “
The old hag is watching us – see? Over there,
pretendin
’ to look in the shop
winda
?”Slide14
Student journeyStudents begin with:
popular conception of language: prescriptive, folk linguistic, normative
Students develop: linguistic conception of language: descriptive, scientific, non-normative
But
Dialect and Literature requires students to access popular
understanding of language
in order to
interrogate what text is doing
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Sample seminar6 studentsAll level 3 at University of Sheffield (c. 21yrs old)
Studying either BA English Language & Literature or English Language & Linguistics
Volunteered for seminars, but also paid
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1. Start from personal response: self mentions, hedges
K:
I don’t know it sort of feels like
that’s a general view of like the general public but then because Charles knows her like he
sort of
sees that there is more to that dialect use than like just sort of being inexpensive so
I think like maybe
the positive light is shed by Charles’s opinion
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2. But then ascribes to other voices:
K:
I don’t know it sort of feels like
that’s a general view of like the general public
but then
because Charles knows her like he sort of sees that there is more to that dialect use
than like just sort of being inexpensive
so I think like maybe
the positive light is shed by Charles’s opinion
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3. Very conscious of judgements:
K: so they talk about
erm
like the first introduction of her language is 'anything but expensive accent' which is quite
like a negative thing to sort of say
about like you'd be offended if someone that to you kind of thing
K
: I don’t know it sort of feels like that’s a general view of like the general public but then because Charles knows her like he sort of sees that there is more to that dialect use than like just sort of being inexpensive
so I think like maybe the positive light
is shed by Charles’s opinion
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4. Keeps different interpretations in play
K:
erm
I don't know it sort of feels like
maybe that's like a general view of like the general public
but then because Charles knows her like he sort of sees that there is
more to
that dialect use than like just sort of being like inexpensive so I think like maybe the positive light is shed is by like Charles's erm opinionsA: so all your stereotypes are being played on but then being juxtaposed by him saying well actually what you know about how she speaks might not be exactly what you think as a reader
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5. Finds ways to synthesise:
A: he's
calling on her as the speaker of non-standard dialect so there's stereotypes and power inversions being played there
J: yes, yes, yes she has information / that he needs
A and K:
/ that
he needs
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Where does this get us?Recognising this is a very complex task
Being more explicit with students about the different kinds of metalanguag
e they are working with
Thinking about my own role both in modelling certain kinds of metalanguage, and the kinds of metalinguistic comment I make on students’ contributions
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ReferencesJaworski, Adam, Nikolas
Coupland
and
Dariusz
Galasinski
(2004) ‘
Metalanguage: Why Now?’ in ed. Adam Jaworski, Nikolas Coupland and Dariusz
Galasinski Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter
. 3-8.Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley (1999), Authority in Language: Investigating Standard
English, 3
rd
Edn
London: Routledge.
Shepherd, Lynn (2012)
Tom-All-
Alone's
,
London: Constable & Robinson.
Stude
, Juliane
(
2007)
‘The
acquisition of metapragmatic abilities in preschool
children’ in Metapragmatics in Use ed. by Wolfram Bublitz and Axel Hubler, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 199-220.Slide23
To
Discover
And
Understand.