[Corpora-List] Phonetic corpora typology

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:15:34 -0500, "Angus B. Grieve-Smith"
> <grvsmth at panix.com> wrote:
>   
>> Why are linguists trying to distinguish language from dialect in the
>> first place?
>>     
>
> One reason is to decide whether two varieties can be served by a common
> literature.  (Most of the languages/dialects in question are hitherto
> unwritten.)  There are many similar practical questions, e.g. for
> schooling.
>   
    All those questions, and the status of "language" or "dialect" 
depend on two things: mutual intelligibility and politics.  Why not just 
compute mutual intelligibility and leave the politics to the politicians?

    Related to the issue of how to measure mutual intelligibility: at 
the 2008 LSA, I attended a fascinating paper by a linguist who was 
studying languages in Cameroon.  He was revising all the mutual 
intelligibility findings based on new data; apparently the researchers 
who had been there before had asked villagers questions like, "Can you 
understand the people in the next village," and they had gotten answers 
like, "Who can understand those people?  They do things so different 
over there."  His work had implications for Greenberg's classification.

    Similarly, there's the study by Rubin (1992) that found that 
comprehension is reduced when the speaker is perceived as "other."  In 
that study, American students listened to a recording of a lecture read 
by "a doctoral student in speech communication, a native speaker of 
English raised in central Ohio, who was well regarded by her own 
undergraduate students for especially effective and clear classroom 
delivery."  While listening, one group of students was shown a slide 
photograph of a "Caucasian" (White) woman, and the other group a photo 
of an "Asian (Chinese)" woman.  The group shown the picture of the Asian 
woman not only claimed that it was more difficult to understand the 
lecture, but they scored lower on comprehension tests compared with the 
group shown the picture of the White woman (7.31 vs. 12.5).

http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.unm.edu/stable/40196047

    In other words, mutual intelligibility is often a political matter.

-- 
				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
				grvsmth at panix.com


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