Time in conversation (work in progress) Jerzy Tomaszczyk Abstract & Handout

The focus of my work are metalinguistic/metapragmatic comments speakers sometimes make to convey temporal information about selected lexical items, as in the example below ... in particular the Orient, what we now call the Middle East, was heavily influenced by a string of colonial administrations (M50, historian, BBCWS 2004) Of interest in cases such as the one above is not just that the Orient is felt to be dated but that the speaker found it necessary to share his feelings about it with his interlocutor and the BBC listeners. In other cases an item is said to be new, the group including vogue words. Also of interest is the extent to which such and similar sentiments are shared by other members of the speech community and the role disclaiming, or flagging, plays in lexical development. Background 1.English lexical loans in the Polish press (new vocabulary): 1972-81 - 8.4%;

1985-92 - 13.6%; 1993-2000 - 25.5%; 2001-2005 - 37.5%

2. Attitudes to foreign lexical material ...trzeba dbać o ten nasz język polski żeby zachowal się taki jaki jest (F34, 29/09/2004, phone in) (we need to take good care of our language for it to stay the way it has always been) ...jak slyszę o jakimś ivencie czy sekondhendzie to dostaję dreszczy (M60-65, 28/10/2012, phone in) (hearing foreign lexical intrusions gives me shivers) ...te wtręty zagraniczne, komiczne po prostu (M50, 19/9/2012, phone in) (those foreign intrusions, it's a joke) ...proszę temu panu powiedzieć, że nie potrzeba używać kalk z języka angielskiego (23/7/2006, e-mail) (please tell the gentleman there is no need to use calques from English) ...kiepscy dziennikarze, którzy profanują język polski (M60, 4/2/2006, phone in) (it's the incompetent journalists who degrade the Polish language) ...a poza tym bardzo się baliśmy szwadronów śmierci z Rady Języka Polskiego (aspiring journalist, M24, 10/5/2005) (and besides we were scared stiff of the Polish Language Police death squads) [24/7 surveilance + an army of whistleblowers] and many many more (own data) 1

NB. Tatsuo Miyajima (1995) "A contrastive study of vocabulary growth in different languages (French, English, Chinese, Japanese)" In Urs Egli et al. (eds) Lexical knowledge in the organisation of language. Benjamins. pp 343357. (large scale lexical borrowing and modernisation) Q - How does new lexical material make its way into texts and then into language in the face of so much opposition? 3. Howard Maclay and Charles E. Osgood (1959) "Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech".Word, vol. 15 pp.19-44. Adolf E. Hieke (1981) "A content processing view of hesitation phenomena". Language and Speech vol 24 pp. 147-160 Hieke's taxonomy of hesitation phenomena: stalls (silent pauses, filled pauses, prospective repeats, syllable prolongation) = before repairs (false starts, retrospective repeats) (repairs: phonological, syntacto-semantic, rhetorical) = after Hesitation phenomena in native German and native English (percentages) (database: 78 one-minute spontaneous conversational samples): NG - stalls 90.80 NE 89.97

repairs

5.83 7.32

parenthetical remarks 3.37 2.71

(cf. also Nicole Dehe and Yordanka Kavalova (eds) (2007).Parentheticals. (Linguistic Aktuel/Linguistics Today 106). Benjamins, esp. Gunther Kaltenboeck, "Spoken parenthetical clauses in English", pp 26-57, and Nicole Dehe, "The ralation between syntactic and prosodic parenthesis", pp 261-284.) 4. The concepts of flag (flagging) and disclaimer flags/flagging cf. Shana Poplack's work on code-switching in US Hispanic communities prosodic effects and verbal routines disclaimers - sociology {cf. Stokes and Hewitt 1975) - verbal routines (incl. inverted commas and quote-unquote gesture) functions - to convey an attitude, evaluation etc., above all to DISCLAIM responsibility for having to use/having just used an item which is/is felt to be marked one way or another (social class, style, register, time, place etc); cf usage labels in lexicography Some examples (incl. some to evaluate the relevance of Hieke's work) Rzeczywistość zawsze jest niezgodna z tryndem (merdiów) (NKJP full corpus, trynd* 130) 2

...tour de force, as we say up in the North (BBCPrime, 16/4/12) Working with people who are # we use this word # socially disadvantaged #, whether they are rebels ... (M42,BBCWS 2004) People are beginnig to say, well who would you like to write a biography of now, which of today's stars, and my answer - there is zilch, I don't have any interest in today's so-called stars (M68, biographer, BBCWS 20/1/2005) ...the silicon chip, the tiny microprocessor, called in the jargon # the central processing unit #, that is the brains behind the personal computer (M52 business commentator, BBCWS 21/1/2005) ...with Turkey denying Armenian versions of what the Armenians call their Holocaust (M45 current affairs commentator, 2004) (silent pauses/filled pauses/protracted delivery/laughter/prominence/demonstrative pronouns/metapragmatic comments/reformulation with or without or/in other words/that is, before or after quotable item, often sets of several effects) Selected literature Jens Alwood et al. (1990). "Speech management - on the non-written life of speech." Nordic J. of Linguistics, 13, 3-48. Wolfram Bublitz and Axel Huebler (eds) (2007). Metapragmatics in use. Benjamins. Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (2007). Language turned on itself. The semantics and pragmatics of metalinguistic discourse. OUP. R.T. Craig (2005) "How we talk about how we talk. Communication theory in the public interest." J. Communication 55. pp. 659-667. William R. Cupach and Sandra Metts (1990). "Remedial processes in embarrasing predicaments". In James A. Anderson (ed.) Communication Yearbook 13. SAGE. pp. 323-352. Troy Heisler et al. (2003). "Evaluative metadiscursive comments and face-work in conversational discourse". J. Pragmatics 55, 1613-1631 John P. Hewitt and Randall Stokes (1975). "Disclaimers".American Solciological Review 40/1. pp. 1-11.. Adam Jaworski et al. (eds) (2004). Metalanguage. Social and ideological perspectives. de Gruyter. John A. Lucy (ed) (1993). Reflexive language. Reported speech and metapragmatics. CUP Sue Wilkinson and Ann Weatherall (2011). "Insertion repair". Research on Language and Social Interaction 41/1. pp. 65-91. 3

4a Mnie na przyklad razi jak w pewnym tlumaczeniu jest napisane, że slużąca wparowala do pokoju. Osoba z rocznika 1882 i z tamtej warstwy spolecznej, z której ona pochodzila nie powiedzialaby, że ktoś wparowal do pokoju. (F64, translator, 23/10/2012) [I for one find it unacceptable when, in a translation, I fread that "a house maid rolled in to the room". A peron who was born in 1882 and considering her social status, she would never have said that "someone rolled into the room".] 4b Thank you for your inquiry about the au pair post - Dziękuję za pytanie dotyczące posady major domus (student transl. 4/2013) NKJP (full corpus): 1. Major Domus????? Proszę jaśniej. 2. Wlaściwym rządcą kraju mial być ambasador carowej, "major domus" 3. ale to nie gosposie, ale tzw. major domus, które potrafią nawet bankiet wyprawić 4. (Polish Wikipedia) etymologia .... dosl. zarządca domu NKJP (full corpus) - au pair 527, operka - 32 5. My focus in current work - time related flags and parenthetical comments, e.g. there is this theory that a totalitarian regime cannot exist if the number of telephones in the population is, I don't know, like 50 per thousand ... and in that year Russia # excuse me # the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, passed that number and immediately fell apart (M55, BBCWS 2003) (Roman empire) ... so if you're going to have the extension of citizenship to conquered peoples, the Roman currency, and the Roman language, sounds-a-little-bit-like-sort-of-an-early form of what we would today call globalisation (M45, BBCWS 2004) Database - ca 300 examples in ca. 1000 h of media two- and multi-party conversations (mostly college/uni educated, mostly experts in their fields, mostly experienced public speakers) (ad hoc, opportunistic, selective - NOT a corpus) Purpose: to confront my data with the NKJP to see what insight can be had from such a comparison, incl. what use both kinds of data are good for. Procedure 6. Several dozen quotable items from my data were checked against corpus materials (NKJP spoken, balanced, full) - conclusion - apparently, what is/what is not a quotable item is so context/speaker/writer etc dependent that - barring some obvious exceptions - no useful generalizations are possible, at least for the time being. That is, there is little or very little text to text (writer to writer) agreement, and in the case of spoken data - virtually none at all. To the extent that my data receives at least some confirmation from the corpus materials, it's beginning to look that media conversational language is more like written language than (truly?) 4

conversational, at least wrt the kind of properties I am interested in. WRT "no useful generalizations are possible" - cf the "second dictionary war" following the publication of Webster's 3rd over, i.a. the label coll. One notable exception - admittedly an extreme case - is the word trynd < (corrupt form of P) trend < E trend - the query trynd* returns 176 examples, of which well over 50% involve a flag or comment or both (before or after). That is data for the balanced corpus, in the full corpus it is 323 examples. It could be argued that in this particular case we are dealing with text to text agreement at the level of full 100%. It looks like a word to watch. ...propolski trynd (slowo "trynd" zapożyczono od sekretarza PZPR tow. Grudnia) (Usenet 9/7/2005) ...taki trynd, jak zwykl mawiać nieodżalowany towarzysz Dycymber (Usenet, 30/8/2006) ...bo to nie byl żaden trynd tylko standyrd (Usenet 23/11/2004) ...dlaczego podkreślasz tę informację w taki sposób cool i tryndy? (Usenet, 30/3/2006) Taki ewolucyjny trynd, jak mówią górale (Usenet, 1/5/2003) ...jak powiedzialby niezapomniany Edward Babiuch, wicie towarzysze to taki trynd (Forum Stanislawa Mi., 14/1/2008) 7. The next step was to check the formulaic rolutines that accompany quotable items in my data against corpus materials. Similarly as before, the spoken component of the NKJP turns up so little that the conclusion in 6 has to be seen as confirmed: even though what I listen to is unscripted, unrehearsed, impromptu, genuinely spontaneous conversation, in terms of what I am looking for it's more like written communication. 8. A relatively small subsample of my data involves what are said to be vogue words - 24 accompanied by as many as 21 different formulas (even the smallest difference counts) made up of a word for vogue (adj or adv, modn* nowoczesn*) and a word of speaking (vb - mów*, nazyw* or n - slow*, termin*, określen*, fraz*, pojęc* as well as trend*, kierun*) e.g. jak to się teraz modnie mówi, to się dziś modnie nazywa, coraz modniejszym terminem, bardzo nowoczesnego terminu etc. Not even one of the 24 different full (or simplified) formulas of my data seems to be part of the spoken NKJP component, but they are quite well represented in the full corpus, viz. modn* mów* - 60, modn* nazyw* - 23, modn* termin* - 23, modn* pojęc* - 25. Modn* trend* comes up 85 times but only two are relevant, and - similarly - only one of the 94 cases of nowoczesn* termin* is pertinent (all the others are for modern airport terminal). Somewhat surprisingly, modn* slow*, the only combination in my data to have more than two representatives, eight in all, does not appear to be part of the NKJP whether you employ the PELCRA or the Poliqarp engine. 9. A much larger set involves what are felt to be dated names for referents that often do not exist 5

anymore. There are as many as 80 formulas in my data accompanying such items, of which only seven are represented by two tokens each. Only seven of the 80 formulas can be found in the spoken subcorpus, represented by small numbers of tokens. In the full corpus I found 27 of those formulas, represented by respectable numbers of tokens, e.g. zwyklo się mówić - 217, zwyklo sie nazywać - 211, jak się mówilo - 91, jak się wtedy mówilo - 67, etc.

6