SEELANGS Digest - 27 Nov 2007 to 28 Nov 2007 - Special issue (#2007-273)

[Will Ryan]

Olga Yokoyama is absolutely right. To ignore so-called crutch words (for 
British English I would add 'basicly' as very common) is to ignore the 
totality of discourse and register, which, in spoken language also 
includes facial expression and bodily gestures. I have been been an 
interpreter in several situations where the choice of words, pauses, 
hesitations, 'crutch' words, and facial expression or hand gestures have 
indicated that the speaker wished to be understood ironically or 
humorously, or wished to be convey that his real feelings were not those 
that would appear in the official written record of the meeting. I was 
astonished, many years ago, to hear in a lecture about the art of 
interpreting, by a professional UN interpreter, that the proper way to 
do 'unbiased' interpreting was to sit in a dark room wearing a headset, 
without sight of the speaker. I don't know how she dealt with the famous 
incident of Khrushchev's shoe.
Will Ryan

Yokoyama, Olga wrote:
> Just a comment on the "crutch words"/"stalling tactics" mentioned in the
> on-going discussion of translation (cf. the quotes below). These words
> and phrases, which are often accused of "littering" the language,
> actually have very important discourse functions such as hedging,
> soliciting a response, expressing a certain stance, etc. etc. They are
> particularly important in person-to-person (hence, oral) communication,
> where communication heavily depends on interlocutor attitudes. These
> words and phrases exist in every language and are being widely studied
> by discourse-oriented linguists (just one example: the co-occurrence of
> the English "y'know" with pauses of 0.5 msec or longer in malfunctioning
> male-female conversation). 
> 
> Diachronically, what now looks like a legitimate lexical item often
> originated as a word or phrase that used to function just like any of
> the "litter" phrases now do; consider, e.g., the clitic "ved'",
> originally from the full-fledged verb "vedeti". Many of the "litter"
> words/phrases in current use are in the process of lexicalization, as is
> evident from their reduced phonological shapes: "y'know" sounds very
> different from a full two-word sequence "you know". 
> 
> That written texts are often consciously purged of these words/phrases
> in certain written traditions is itself a phenomenon peculiar to these
> written traditions. But when necessary, even in written English, say,
> hedging can be accomplished, but this is usually done by other means,
> such as by inserting the bookish "evidently", "allegedly" or even by
> explicit clauses like "although this is not entirely certain". Like
> esthetic judgements, what consitutes "good writing" (or "good speaking")
> is never an absolute or universal matter.    
> 
> [quoting Renee Stillings: Oh, and drop all the crutch words. Russian,
> both written, and verbal, is often littered with ambiguous
> (non-committal ...) terms like "v principe," "vozmozhno," etc. In nearly
> all cases these can just be dropped for the sake of good writing ... or
> speaking. I can't tell you how many times a question along the lines of
> "How's the weather today?" is answered by "V principe, kholodno." Is it
> or isn't it???] 
> 
> [quoting Paul Gallagher: Listen to some man-in-the-street interviews on
> TV and you'll hear the same stalling tactics here -- "I mean," "you
> know," etc. In the presidential debates, you hear "the fact of the
> matter is" (which generally introduces a lie, but that's another kettle
> of worms)...]
> 
> 
> Olga T. Yokoyama
> Professor
> Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL 
> University of California, Los Angeles
> 
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