Language Prescription. Группа авторов
its uses, to protect or discriminate against speakers of minority languages. When even contradictory outcomes are possible, it is difficult for descriptive linguists to know how to create the most relevant and least damaging materials.
3.2 Where to go from here?
With several types of both prescriptivism and descriptivism available, the continued use of the bifurcation remains questionable. It might be clearer to those conducting research and those contributing to research and those using research if different terms were available for the different concepts required by the realities of field research. Discussions of variation, deviance (Chomsky, 1995; Zahedi, 2007) and idiolect are crucial in the development and applications of more specific terms that are predicated on the sources of prescriptivism and whether that prescriptivism is used to benefit or to harm. The concepts might vary depending on what arises in any given field situation, as well. If so, a reconsideration of the terms and concepts based on what is found in field situations could become necessary. Descriptive research might again become the driving force behind not just descriptive theoretical development, but also developments in explanatory theory.
Acknowledgements
The specific language informants do not wish to be individually identified, but they must be acknowledged as a group for their consistently generous, thoughtful and profound contribution to the research on Hobongan. My work has also been immeasurably aided by Rachel Searcy, whose knowledge of Hobongan language and culture has made much of this research possible.
Notes
(1)There are notable exceptions, for example: Greene (1999) wrote a description of Belizean Creole which was based primarily on a sociolinguistic analysis of the language; Sonora Yaqui Language Structures (Dedrick & Casad, 1999) includes several narratives with some analysis of the structures of those narratives; Kieviet (2017) includes a more generous selection of interlinear texts than many other descriptions, although the author limits himself to analysis of sounds-through-syntax.
(2)I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who brought to my attention the fact that older generations can be dismayed by language changes and start insisting that a language be spoken in an ‘authentic’ way and that such insistence, which is an attempt to preserve a language, can have devastating effects on younger people’s willingness to try to speak the language (e.g. Dorian, 1994, for East-Sutherland Gaelic).
(3)As of early 2019, a Hobongan student decided to continue on to university to study education, with the stated goal of returning to the Hobongan villages to teach students in Hobongan. I sincerely hope that she can continue towards her goal and will be able to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to develop a curriculum in her first language. There is broad community support for her project, but whether that translates into concrete support after she graduates remains to be seen.
(4)Some linguists have emphasized norms and normativity instead of standards and prescription in an attempt to distinguish more precisely the types of interventions made to establish the status of a language (see Armstrong & Mackenzie, 2013; Haas, 1982).
References
Armstrong, N. and Mackenzie, I.E. (2013) Standardization, Ideology, and Linguistics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Comrie, B. and Smith, N. (1977) Lingua descriptive studies: Questionnaire. See http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/~jrvalent/LIN427F2005web/attachments/LDSQWordOutline.doc.
Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Czaykowska-Higgins, E. (2009) Research models, community engagement, and linguistic fieldwork: Reflections on working with Canadian indigenous communities. Language Documentation and Conservation 3 (1), 15–50.
Dedrick, J.M. and Casad, E.H. (1999) Sonora Yaqui Language Structures. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Dimmendaal, G.J. (2001) Places and people: Field sites and informants. In P. Newman and M. Ratliff (eds) Linguistic Fieldwork (pp. 55–75). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorian, N.C. (1994) Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival. Language in Society 23 (4), 479–494.
Drake, G.F. (1977) The Role of Prescriptivism in American Linguistics, 1820–1970. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Greene, L.A. (1999) A Grammar of Belizean Creole: Compilations from Two Existing United States Dialects. Bern: Peter Lang.
Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. and Bank, S. (eds) (2020) Glottolog 4.2.1. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. See http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/hovo1239
Haas, W. (1982) Introduction: On the normative character of language. In W. Haas (ed.) Standard Languages Spoken and Written. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kalogjera, D. and Starčević, A. (2014) Deconstruction of the native speaker and ideology of the standard language: Language users caught between descriptivism and manipulation. English Studies as Archive and as Prospecting 9, 18–21.
Kieviet, P. (2017) A Grammar of Rapa Nui. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Lewis, M.P., Simons, G.F. and Fennig, C.D. (eds) (2016) Hovogan. In Ethnologue: Languages of the World (19th edn). Dallas, TX: SIL International. See http://www.ethnologue.com.
Milroy, J. (1992) Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Perkins, M. (2017) Toward a typology of ranking elements of narrative discourse in languages and cultures: A cross-linguistic survey. International Journal of Literary Linguistics 6 (1). See https://journals.linguistik.de/ijll/article/view/101
Pike, K.L. (1964) Beyond the sentence. College Composition and Communication 15 (3), 129–135.
Sellato, B. and Sercombe, P.G. (2007) Introduction: Borneo, hunter-gatherers, and change. In P. Sercomb and B. Sellato (eds) Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo’s Hunter-gatherers in the 21st Century (pp. 1–49). Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
Zahedi, K. (2007) Grammaticality in the minimalist program. Journal of Human Sciences 55, 85–94.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.