Teachers of English Language A Level and GCSE

Have you seen our workshop on Analysing Spoken Language?

Why do young people say innit? (e.g. It's only an hour from Edinburgh and Newcastle, innit?) Or why do so many people use be like? (e.g. I'm like 'I was only joking'). What functions do these features have in spoken language? What is your reaction to these features when they are used? 

The workshop aims at disseminating to English Language teachers the insights obtained from scholarly research into language variation and change, and to provide teachers with an overview of databanks and resources available on-line for use in the classroom. The focus of the workshop is on the use of so-called discourse-pragmatic features, i.e., features such as innit, be like or dead (e.g. It was dead funny.). These features are often wrongly dismissed as mere fillers which contribute nothing to the content or communicative force of an utterance. Even worse, their use is often perceived to be a sign of inarticulateness, laziness or lack of intelligence.

In the first part of the workshop, we aim to break down persisting prejudices against the use and users of these features. We will demonstrate how these features develop, what communicative function they perform in interaction (e.g. to signal tentativeness or assertiveness, to facilitate speaker change, etc.), and how they change over time. We thereby hope to raise participants’ awareness of these features and to demonstrate that they play a vital role in interaction.

In the second part of the workshop, we provide teachers with an overview of currently available resources for working with spoken data in the classroom, focusing in particular on a demonstration of two projects specifically aimed at providing teachers with relevant resources.

Where?

Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

When?

Wednesday 4th July, 2-7pm

Cost?

£25

What is included?

Workshop led by academics involved in current research on spoken language, lecture by leading sociolinguist Professor Jenny Cheshire, Resource Booklet with classroom materials.

There are only a few spaces left ........for more details of programme click here

Online booking

or contact Dr Sue Fox s.p.fox@qmul.ac.uk 

And we went to get some fish 'n’ chips

Fish, chips 'n' lemon

We probably say and more often than any other English word, but how often do we notice that sometimes we pronounce it as and, with the full vowel, and sometimes as n, with no vowel at all?  Sometimes too, we pronounce and as en or end, with a reduced vowel and, perhaps, no /d/.

Dagmar Barth-Weingarten points out that although English speakers happily substitute one pronunciation of and for another we are rarely aware of the fine phonetic details of our pronunciation. She also comments that although researchers have analysed variation in the pronunciation of and as well as variation in its different linguistic functions, the two kinds of variation haven’t yet been considered together.  She therefore did exactly this for and as used in the CallHome English corpus of telephone conversations between American friends and family members.  Her analysis revealed a strong relationship between how the speakers pronounced and and its function.

When and was linking two words related in their meaning, it was more likely to be reduced in form. So, speakers were more likely to say n or en in compound nouns like bed and breakfast (we slept in the bed and breakfast), or fish and chips  (let’s have fish and chips for dinner). On the other hand, they were more likely to give and its full pronunciation when it connected two separate clauses, as in we slept in the bed and we didn’t notice the lumps.

Barth-Weingarten found that the pronunciation of and can also help to organise turn-taking. For example, compare the two ands in A’s last turn in the example below, where B is asking how A spent the night on her holiday:

                        B:            you slept in the shed huh?

                        A:            no.  but when my cousins came up

                        B:            yeah

                        A:            they all slept out in the shed

                        B:            all? oh

                        A:            an of course see Ella couldn’t be left out so                                        she went n slept in the shed with them

The first and in the last part of A’s speech is relatively unreduced, (with only the [d] deleted), as turns out to be usual when and connects two separate events in a story (here, they all slept in the shed and Ella couldn’t be left out).  But the pronunciation of and here not only connects the story events. In addition, it acts as a turn-taking cue for speaker B, who realises that A is going to say more and so does not take a turn until later.  In contrast, the fully reduced n form of and connects the two verbs went and slept which are not only next to each other in the discourse but also cognitively connected, referring to a single event. 

Barth-Weingarten concludes that it is cognitive distance (and sometimes physical distance) which influences variation in the pronunciation of and.  She also notes the special status of and in and-um sequences, as these are unlikely to be reduced through either /d/ deletion or vowel weakening.  Even though she cautions that other factors come into play to affect the pronunciation of and (such as emphasis and the speed at which an utterance is spoken), and that the different pronunciations of and need to be seen in their context (situational, interactional and phonetic) she suggests that research like this shows that variation in the pronunciation of a word can make a difference.

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Barth-Weingarten, D. (2012) Of Ens ‘n’ Ands: Observations on the Phonetic Make-up of a Coordinator and its Uses in Talk-in-Interaction; Language and Speech 55:35-56

doi: 10.1177/0023830911428868

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

It's about THIS big

There are many ways we can communicate with each other.  During face-to-face conversation, we use more than words to communicate meaning and emotion.  For example, we can use different types of eye contact and use our hands to make a variety of gestures.

These types of non-linguistic communication, when taken together, are often referred to as ‘body language’.  But how does what we say relate to the gestures we use?  Do we sometimes modify our gestures, depending on the types of feedback we get from the person we’re talking to?

Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin designed an experiment which aimed to investigate what they call ‘co-speech gestures’.  These are gestures (i.e. hand and arm movements) which are directly related to what is spoken at the time they are used.  For example, when saying something like “he just drove away”, a gesture such as a hand sweeping away from the body may be used.   They wanted to investigate whether the amount of gestures increased when a speaker received feedback (such as questions) from the addressee during storytelling. In addition, the experiment was designed to look at how gestures might be modified following feedback.  For example, if describing an object, you might say “it was oddly shaped” while making a low, rough gesture with your hands to approximate what you’re describing.  However, if the person you’re talking to questions “how was it shaped?”, your gesture is likely to be repeated, but in a higher position and a more accurate way in order to give more detail and meaning to your description. Indeed, Holler and Wilkin identified four ways in which a gesture may be modified:

1)  Gesture precision (how precise it is in relation to what is being described)

2)  Gesture size (how much articulation space did the gesture ‘take up’)

3)  Gesture space (for example, where in the addressee’s eye-line was the gesture made?)

4)  Gesture viewpoint (was the gesture made, for example, from the story-teller’s or the character’s point of view?)

In addition to these, they wanted to investigate the use of ‘deictic markers’ and how their use relates to a speaker’s gaze.  For example, the use of ‘this’ in “it was this big” coupled with a shift in the speaker’s gaze to their own gesture signals to the addressee that they should also look at the gesture for the information it contains.

The experiment involved 28 British English females all telling a story relating to a silent film they were required to watch.  They then told the story of the film to one of the researchers (though they didn’t know who she was at the time), while the researcher asked four pre-planned questions at specific points of the story in addition to any natural behaviour and feedback.

The results showed that there were no differences in the amount of gestures before and after feedback, except when the pre-planned question was one which aimed to get confirmation from the speaker (i.e. a ‘yes’ answer).  In this context, the gesture rate decreased after the feedback.  In addition, 76% of gesture pairs before and after the four feedback questions were judged to be ‘more communicative’ after feedback with respect to the criteria above, particularly on the dimensions of precision, size and space.  These results, Holler and Wilkin suggest, show how gestures are designed for the recipient and are modified to give information which complements what is being said.

The results relating to eye gaze and deictic markers (such as ‘this’ and ‘that’) showed that there was an increase in the use of these markers relating directly to the gestures after feedback, as well as gaze shifting to the gestures.  Therefore, the increased accuracy and prominence of the gestures after feedback was directly linked to the linguistic descriptions, and these modifications were indicated to the addressee through a shift of the speaker’s gaze towards the gesture.  This shows how linguistic communication and gesture are closely linked in face-to-face interaction - not all meaning is carried by the words we say, as the more precise and ‘communicative’ our gestures, the more meaning they contribute.

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Holler, J. and Wilkin, K. (2011) An experimental investigation of how addressee feedback affects co-speech gestures accompanying speakers’ responses; Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3522-3536

doi :10.1016/j.pragma.2011.08.002

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Linguistic tails

Language has tails too!

Tails are grammatical structures added to the end of a clause, like wilt ref (‘will the referee’ in the Bolton English dialect) in example (1) in the box, this pub in (2), you are in (3) and that in (4).  

(1) He’ll watch, wilt ref (he’ll watch, will the referee)

(2) You’re a nice set of buggers you are

(3) It holds the record, this pub, for growing celery, hard to believe

(4) It’s a serious picture that

Ivor Timmis analysed tails in the English spoken 70 years ago in Bolton, Lancashire (northeast England). He points out that although some of the tail structures – like wilt ref, where the verb comes before the subject – may be more common in northern English dialects, overall tails are common in all varieties of spoken English, and were just as common in the late 1930s as they are today. They are also typical of the spoken varieties of many other languages.

Why should tails be so long-lasting and so widespread? Timmis argues that the reason lies in the two main functions that they have in speech.

First, they have a psycholinguistic function. Tails help people to cope with the pressures of spontaneous speech, when they don’t have much time to plan ahead what they are going to say. As a result speakers may decide in the middle of an utterance that something they have just referred to needs to be explained better. Adding a tail allows them to add a clarification. Timmis illustrates this with an example from a spectator at a Bolton Wanderers football match (example (5) below. The speaker was first struck by the age of one of the players (33). Then in his enthusiasm the speaker reaches for a non-specific noun to refer to the player (feller), and eventually realises that he needs to make it clear exactly who he is talking about (this right back). As the examples in the box show, the pronoun or noun in the tail always refer to something or someone the speaker has already mentioned in the main clause.

(5) This feller must be well in the 33s, this right back

The other main function of tails is to convey the speaker’s evaluation of what they are saying, or to add emphasis. In (5) the speaker clearly thinks that the football player is doing well for his age. And tails often occur after clauses with evaluative adjectives like awful, shocking or nice (as in (2)), evaluative nouns like outrage, shame or nuisance or with swear words. Showing how they feel about what they are talking about helps speakers to relate well to each other. An additional social function comes from the fact that we recognise tails as markers of informality, so they can help us strike the right note in a conversation.

Timmis suggests that it is their combined psycholinguistic and social functions that have made tails so long-lasting in English. In his words, they are a “linguistic survival of the fittest”. As a result, he says, they deserve a proper place in the linguistic description of English and they should be included in the English Language teaching syllabus.

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Timmis, Ivor (2009) ‘Tails’ of linguistic survival. Applied Linguistics 31: 325-345.

doi: 10.1093/applin/amp028

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Analysing Spoken English: A workshop for English Language teachers

Date of Event

4^th July 2012

Venue

Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

Places Available

40

Cost

£25

Description

The workshop aims at disseminating the insights obtained from scholarly research into language variation and change, and to provide teachers with an overview of databanks and resources available on-line for use in the classroom. The focus of the workshop is on the use of so-called discourse-pragmatic features, i.e., features such as innit (e.g. It’s only an hour from Edinburgh and Newcastle, innit? – Oh, I’ve answered this one before, innit?), be like (e.g. And they were like, “we divn’t want you here.” And we were like, "why?") or dead (e.g.It was dead funny.). These features are often wrongly dismissed as mere fillers which contribute nothing to the content or communicative force of an utterance. Even worse, their use is often perceived to be a sign of inarticulateness, laziness or lack of intelligence. We aim to break down persisting prejudices against the use and users of these features. We will demonstrate how these features develop, what communicative function they perform in interaction (e.g. to signal tentativeness or assertiveness, to facilitate speaker change, etc.), and how they change over time.

For further details:

http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/englishlanguageteaching/londonworkshop/

CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE

First or last: does final position make a difference then?

So coming first or last does make a difference then!

Which, in your opinion, is more typical of spoken English: example (1), where then is in initial position in the clause call him or example (2), where then is in final position?

       1)  Sharmila: If you like him, then call him

       2)  Ann: I like him

            Joe: call him then

Alexander Haselow points out that in final position connectors such as then are very frequent in spoken language, whereas in written language they are almost non-existent. This indicates, he explains, one of the essential differences between spoken and written language – the fact that spoken language is spontaneous and unplanned. In the initial position of a clause, as in (1), then explicitly links call him to if you like him and guides the listener to interpret call him as a consequence of if you like him. In (2), though, where Joe adds then to the clause after he has uttered it, each clause is presented as a separate idea. It is only after he has expressed these ideas that Joe shows how they are related.

Haselow analysed 1000 tokens of clause-final then in the spoken component of the ICE-GB corpus. He found that speakers use then in final position not only to relate two separate clauses, but also to strengthen the force of what they had just said and even to indicate a range of attitudes towards what they had just uttered.  For example, in (3), then strengthens the force of B’s question. In (4), the use of then implies that speaker B is impatient.

     3)  A: oh he’s fairly happy

          B: why do you think he doesn’t write then

     4)  B: and you were going apparently he would uhm say choo choo choo                  choo or something

          A: I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about

          B: well you have to listen to the tape then

When then relates two separate clauses to each other in these ways it helps to organise the discourse. Sometimes, though, speakers in the corpus used then in clause-final position not to link two separate clauses but instead to link an utterance to an idea that was implied rather than actually uttered. Approximately 20 per cent of final then tokens were of this kind in the ICE–GB corpus and all occurred in information–seeking questions beginning with a wh-word, such as what or why. For example, asking a friend what have you been up to today then may not relate to anything that has been previously uttered but may instead simply introduce a topic of conversation, implying that the speaker expects their friend to have been doing something and that the friend will be willing to talk about it.

Haselow concludes that then has developed from a time adverb (and then he kissed me) to a discourse marker (as in examples (2), (3) and (4)) and then to a modal particle (as in what have you been up to today then?), with all three functions coexisting in spoken English today.

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Haselow, Alexander (2011) Discourse marker and modal particle: The functions of utterance-final then in spoken English. Journal of Pragmatics 43:3603-3623

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.002

This summary was written by Jenny Amos and Jenny Cheshire