linguistic chauvenisms

[Dennis R. Preston]

>Ellen,


Yes, of course some of this is "relative." Some might claim, for
example, that "wuz" is not "eye-dialect" since it represents a higher
vowel than a "fancy" (from my point of view) /a/-like pronunciation.
In some cases, though, (e.g., "sez") no relativity seems to exist.

One could also argue that since they (i.e., your students)are
representing caricature, caricaturistic spellings of their own might
even feed discussion of the representation of dialects in popular
culture. My complaint had always been about the professional use of
such respellings (where they seem most inappropriate), and I don't
buy for one minute the claim, from some ethnomethodologists, for
example, who want to pay peculiar attention to the details of actual
speech, that they "don't have time" to learn phonetic transcription
or that such transcription would make their transcripts unreadable
(as if extensive idiosyncratic repelling would not make them
unreadable). Haaaarumph!

Oh-oh; you got me going again just when I was trying to be nice.

dInIs



>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dennis R. Preston [mailto:preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU]
>
>As you might suspect, I have a little vested interest in this and may
>be too strident or demanding.
>
>dInIs
>
>
>speaking of your being demanding, Dennis, I have students in a
>"politics of language" class who are doing a paper on the use of
>dialects as part of characterization in television and movies.
>knowing of your paper on how we should represent such speech in our
>research, I have wondered about the best way to have them represent
>examples from dialogue.  my interpretation of your view is that we
>should not use respellings at all, but when a character's speech is
>different enough from what readers would expect, you suggest  using
>IPA instead.
>
>the point of this research assignment is to show how the accents are
>exaggerated and these students don't know IPA from, well, Cyrillic.
>so it has been interesting to think about how they may perpetuate
>the stereotypes they are trying to expose by their choice of how to
>represent the characters' speech. I decided to allow respellings,
>but not eye dialect.  isn't your position that "eye dialect" is a
>relative term?  classic definitiion would be respelling to represent
>a "normal" pronunciation, but what is "normal"? thus, I tend to use
>it to mean respelling of words that are pronounced the same way I
>pronounce them.  Ellen