Linguistic Variation Quotes

TEXAN: “Where are you from?” HARVARD STUDENT: “I am from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.” TEXAN: “OK, where are you from, jackass?” —Variation on an old joke

Consider just a few of the expressions that fall under the umbrella ARGUMENT IS WAR, collected by the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson. Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument. I've never won an argument with her. You don't agree? Okay, shoot! If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out. She shot down all of my arguments. Or the many variations of LOVE IS A JOURNEY: Our relationship has hit a dead-end street. It's stalled; we can't keep going the way we've been going. Look how far we've come. It's been a long, bumpy road. We can't turn back now. We're at a crossroads. We may have to go our separate ways. The relationship isn't going anywhere. We're spinning our wheels. Our relationship is off the track. Our marriage is on the rocks. I'm thinking of bailing out.

Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of ASL used by Black Americans in the United States, often more heavily in the Southern states. ASL and BASL diverged as a result of race-based school segregation. Because student populations were isolated from one another, the language strands evolved separately, to include linguistic variations in phonology, syntax, and vocabulary. BASL is often stigmatized when compared to “standard” ASL. The measurement of “standard signs” is particularly fraught, because it is based on signs used at Gallaudet University, a formerly segregated institution. The belief that one variant of a language is superior to others is called prescriptivism, and subscribers frequently conflate nonstandard usage with error. In the United States, progressive linguists argue that prescriptivism and prestige languages are tools for preserving existing hierarchies and power structures, with ties to Eurocentrism and white supremacist ideology.

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds. What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development. In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were largely explored by artists. For example, the boundary between the domains played an important role in innovative works such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Reich's Different Trains (cf. Risset, 1991). In the 21st century, science is finally beginning to catch up, as relations between spoken and musical sound systems prove themselves to be a fruitful domain for research in cognitive neuroscience. Such work has already begun to yield new insights into our species' uniquely powerful communicative abilities.

There are as many approaches as there are families, but linguists have defined three main ones with infinite variations: The one-parent-one-language approach, the minority language at home approach, and the mixed language approach.

Language itself could be interpreted as one of those enigmatic creatures or ‘products’ of [Jordenian] ‘e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n.’ One of many examples is the transition from ‘Old English’ to ‘Middle English’ towards the present variations of English, spoken and written. If Old and Middle English literature ‘represent/s’ [grammatically ‘undecided’] a potential linguistic ‘challenge’ to some or many modern readers in Haluxinor, it would follow that the English this particular auteur thinks, speaks, and writes in might, arguably, have been incomprehensible to bibliophiles in the early ‘medieval’ e-r-a-s of [terrestrial] civilization. It would probably require a ‘time-traveling’ aparato/maquina of some ‘species’ [pseizbergslunk ‘sci-fi’ emphases mine] to ‘hark back’ to the ‘aeons’ of Bede and Chaucer, respectively, to be (+/-) 99.9 percent certain, but I am relatively confident that it is not an entirely inaccurate… speculation.” Emperor Baron Francis Cosmicus [The Dromernaut Odyssey Anno Domini 3193]

For generations, linguists had very little idea what to make of this kind of variation. On the whole, most linguists were inclined to consider the speech of educated people as the primary object of description and investigation, while the vernacular speech of uneducated people was usually dismissed as being of no consequence – except in dialectology, in which the speech of elderly, uneducated, rural speakers was commonly considered to be the most suitable for investigation. Since earlier linguists were overwhelmingly male, there was perhaps also a comparable tendency to treat men’s speech as the norm, while women’s speech, where it differed, was often disregarded as inconsequential. Otherwise, however, the very high degree of variation within a single community was, for the most part, simply ignored: at best it was considered to be a peripheral and insignificant aspect of language, no more than erratic and even random departures from the norms, while at worst it was regarded as a considerable nuisance, as a collection of tiresome details getting in the way of good descriptions.

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES Phonological: BASL signers are more likely to produce two-handed signs, use an overall larger signing space, and tend to produce more signs on the lower half of the face. Syntactical: A higher incidence of syntactic repetition appears in multiple studies of BASL signers. A study documented in 2011 also showed more frequent use of constructed dialogue and constructed action among Black signers. Lexical Variation: Some signs developed at Black Deaf schools diverge completely from standard ASL signs, mostly for everyday objects and activities discussed frequently by students. Linguists have also noticed an increase in lexical borrowing of words and idioms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) among younger Black signers. Due to the prevalence of the oral method in white deaf education after the Milan Conference, many white deaf children were denied access to American Sign Language, and ASL was subjugated by spoken English. However, significantly fewer resources were dedicated to Black deaf education, leaving many Black Deaf schools to pursue manual language. As such, scholars note that some variations common in BASL, like a higher incidence of two-handed signs, are actually a preservation of the linguistic qualities of early ASL. (Jump to “ASL, origins of.”) NOTABLE PEOPLE Platt H. Skinner, abolitionist and founder of The School for Colored Deaf Dumb and Blind Children, circa 1858. (Jump to “Directory of U.S. Black Deaf Schools.”) Carl Croneberg, a Swedish-American Deaf linguist, was the first person to note differences between ASL and BASL in writing, as coauthor of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on its Linguistic Principles (see also: William Stokoe). Dr. Carolyn McCaskill’s 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, features data from a series of studies performed by McCaskill and her team, and is considered a foundational work in the field.

Qirat (pl. of Qirah) in Islam refers to the various ways of reciting the Holy Quran. These are different lexical, phonetic, linguistic, morphological, and syntactical manners permitted with reciting the Quran. Each Qirah has its own certain rules of recitation and variations in words and letters. Qirat also refers to the branch of Islamic studies that deals with these recitation manners. Thus, Qirat are the verbalization of the Quran, and the Quran is preserved in Qirat.

Ian's 'cannot bear' was on a direct par with Son Andrew's statement, during his summer holidays, that he was 'desperate to get a job.'  'Desperate' was used interestingly here.  'Desperate to get a job' comprised lying in bed until about 11.30 and then stumbling about for a bit before embarking on a fruitless amble around the immediate locale with several of his mates, calling into shops on the off-chance and no doubt frightening the proprietors rigid with their gangling six foot clumsiness, their menacing inarticulacy, and their shuffling gait of the young homeless.  'Give us ten pounds Mum, there are no jobs to be had anywhere.' 'Anywhere' in this situation was also an interesting variation on received meaning.  Anywhere, apparently, could also mean 'this small bit of London in which we live'.  Just to be fair, and not to imply that the sororiety was hanging back in the matter of the changing shape of the English language, Daughter Claire's linguistics were also interesting.  To pick one at random - 'it's doing my head in' - could be said of anything from the introduction to the household of cheaper shampoos, to the imposition of a five minute rule for the telephone - both of which were quite likely, in Daughter Claire's head-done-in state, to contrive the failure of all three of her A levels and a permanent place under a blanket outside Woolworths .

The surprise here is that the social classes just below the top of the hierarchy actually use more of the prestigious (r)-1 variants in formal styles than the classes above them. This unexpected pattern, in which intermediate social classes ‘overreach’ their social superiors, is called hypercorrection in one of its two meanings (see Spotlight on p. 237), and Labov has suggested that it may be indicative of ongoing change from above, i.e. in the direction of an overtly prestigious norm. Such changes, he argues, are most likely to be led not by the highest social class but by the lower middle or upper working classes further down the hierarchy, i.e. precisely those who hypercorrect for the New York (r) variable above. Being acutely aware of their precarious position between the established middle and working classes, these groups are more sensitive to social variation than those in more secure or entrenched class positions.

Variation in this case was based not on class or gender, but on speakers’ attitudes to the place in which they lived and worked. The local centralized forms had become, in McMahon’s (1994: 242) words: ‘the linguistic equivalent of wearing a T-shirt which says “I’m not a tourist, I live here”.

Much of the human cerebral cortex is devoted to the complexities of language and tool-use. Humans are genetically adapted to learn to speak a natural language, but the differences among natural languages apparently are trivial compared with their fundamental similarities in structure and ontogeny. There is no evidence that variations in natural languages have any adaptive significance, hence the human capacity to learn a variety of languages is best considered an incidental byproduct of linguistic ability.

She sighed hard and shook her head, realized she was still staring at the same recipe card in her hand. She propped it against the monitor and read again, Elegant French Pork and Beans, by Carmine Grosz of Huron, South Dakota. She scanned the recipe, which called for haricot beans- a not inelegant bean, Olivia thought. Two kinds of sausage, two cuts of pork. Leeks. Well. This looked like a midwesternized cassoulet- definitely better than the usual "Casserole Corner" fare, which was largely made up of recipes containing endless and minute variations on the same hot dishes, issue after issue. For a couple of years there, chicken and broccoli had been all the rage: Chicken Broccoli Divan, Chicken Broccoli 'Divine', Chicken Broccoli Supreme ("Them's fightin' words," Ruby had told Vivian). Chicken Broccoli Surprise, Chicken Broccoli 'Rice' Surprise (David: "Where's the surprise? You've just listed all the ingredients in the title"). Elegant Company Chicken-Broccoli Casserole. "Which is the inelegant part," Olivia had asked over the phone from college, because she was studying ambiguous reference in her Linguistic Description of Modern English class, "the company or the casserole?

Lardiere, D. (2006) conducted Tyler & Nagy’s (1989) test to Patty; a Chinese speaking who has obtained master degree in USA Universities and has reached near native-like competence in English. In her test Lardiere, D. (2006) analyzed Patty’s Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of English Suffixes, i. e., Patty’s ability to recognize the part of speech of the derivatives by their suffixes (e. g. aggressive and workable are adjectives). Comparing Patty’s results with those of Tyler & Nagy (1989), Lardiere, D. (2006) notes that Patty’s Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of English Suffixes (as demonstrated by Patty’s scores in the nonce-words test) is higher than that of eighth grade English children, while, on the other hand, her ability to choose the proper real-derived word which suits the given syntactic context (as demonstrated by Patty’s scores in the real-word items test), equalizes that of sixth grade English children. Apparently, there is Morphological Translation Equivalence that pair derivatives and suffixes of the two languages share with each other which has enhanced Patty’s Knowledge of Syntactic Properties of L2 suffixes, even though her ability in choosing the proper derivational form which suits the given syntactic context has remained equal to that of sixth grade native children. Hence, the variation between L1 and L2 acquisition of Syntactic Properties of Suffixes is caused by L1 influence.