linguistic chauvenisms

[Johnson, Ellen]

-----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