J is for Jokes

The polemical Slovenian cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently published a book of jokes designed, in the words of the blurb, to ‘provide an index to certain philosophical, political, and sexual themes that preoccupy him’.

This got me thinking about our own field, and the illustrative jokes that I often weave into talks — none of them as incisive, as witty or as racy as Žižek’s, I fear — but perhaps worth sharing, nevertheless, not least for the light they might shed on various aspects of language and of language learning. Here is a selection.

Firstly, then: jokes about language:

1. Semantics

Adam (naming the animals): And finally, that is a hippopotamus.
Eve: Why is it called a hippopotamus?
Adam: Because it looks like a hippopotamus, silly!

I like this one because (for me) it pokes fun at the notion that we are hard-wired with the mental representations of the things we refer to when we use language – what has been called ‘mentalese’. That is to say, the concept HIPPOPOTAMUS pre-exists our actual encounter with a real one in the wild and is a precondition for our being able to name it. As Jerry Fodor puts it, ‘One cannot learn a language unless one has a language.’¹  Of course, none of the proponents of mentalese – Fodor included  – would go so far as to suggest that the word itself (i.e. ‘hippopotamus’) is part of our DNA, but the idea that you wouldn’t be able to think about a hippopotamus without your having been pre-programmed to do so seems equally implausible.

On a more mundane level, the joke also captures a particular mindset displayed by some (not very good) teachers that assumes that English words are self-explanatory, and often takes the form of exchanges like this:

Student (baffled by unfamiliar word in text): What means ‘hippopotamus’?
Teacher: A hippopotamus?  A hippopotamus is, erm, a hippopotamus.

2. Pragmatics

Man (on park bench to woman, admiring the dog at her feet): Does your dog bite?
Woman: No.
(Man pats dog and is bitten).
Man: I thought you said your dog didn’t bite!
Woman: It’s not my dog.

A perfect illustration of the flouting of Grice’s ‘maxim of quantity’: ‘Make your contribution just as informative as required.’

3. Prescriptivism

I love anything that takes the mickey out of the grammar police:

A Texan was visiting Harvard University, and was lost. He stopped a student and asked, “Do you know where the library is at?” “I sure do,” replied the student, “But, you know, you’re not supposed to end sentences with prepositions.” “Oh, ok,” said the Texan, “Do you know where the library is at, asshole?”

4. Precriptivism AND pragmatics

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right.”

Which reminds me that I’ve yet to see a corpus-based study of the not totally unusual discourse marker and turn initiator: ‘Yeah. No.’

As in:

Half past six? It’ll all be finished by then will it?
Erm yeah no. Say seven o’clock anyway…

Carol’s having one, did you know?
Yeah no yes well, she told us when she’s a– (unclear) having one…

(from the British National Corpus)

5. Miscommunication

The following joke was told to me at primary school when I had no idea where Wembley was, but for some odd reason it made a lasting impression.

There are three hearing-challenged men on a train. (It wasn’t ‘hearing-challenged’ when I was at school, of course).

1^st man: Is this Wembley?
2^nd: No, it’s Thursday.
3^rd: So am I. Let’s have a drink.

What I loved (and still love) about this joke is that none of the men is aware that they’ve misheard the other: an instance of misunderstanding, rather than partial understanding, where, in the words of people who study these things, ‘the interlocutor who misunderstands is not aware of it’².  I suspect that this kind of misunderstanding between second language users occurs more often than we think, and is possibly a characteristic of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication — which may, in turn, account for the impression given in the literature that ELF interactions are invariably successful. The reality is that no one realizes that they have been misunderstood.

6. Classroom talk

Misunderstandings occur between teachers and learners too, of course, as in this joke:

Teacher: What is the outside layer of a tree trunk composed of? Jimmy?
Jimmy: Dunno.
Teacher: BARK, Jimmy, BARK!
Jimmy: Woof woof. Woof woof.

I’ve witnessed similar interactional cross-purposes during classroom observations, where the teacher’s real question has been misconstrued as a display question – as in this (real) example:

Teacher: How was your weekend?
Student: Fantastic – I won the lottery!
Teacher: Wow! How much did you win?
Student: I didn’t. It was just a sentence.

7. Language acquisition

Doctor: What’s the matter?
Patient: I’ve got a pain in my kidley.
Doctor: You mean kidney.
Patient: That’s what I said, diddle I?

Failure to register the non-target-like nature of one’s own interlanguage is a characteristic of both first and second language acquisition. The child and the learner – like the patient – can hear and recognize the target pronunciation, but can’t hear themselves not achieving it. Which suggests that there is more to pronunciation teaching than simply ear-training and imitating models: you have to be able to hear yourself.

8. Real-time processing

A French scholar has been awarded a prestigious prize in the US. Not being an English speaker, he follows the advice of his colleagues by repeatedly practising ‘Thank you very much’ – but without the tell-tale ‘z’ so typical of French speakers. ‘THHHHank you very much… THHHHank you very much’ – day and night, even using a mirror to monitor the position of his tongue. On the fateful day, he walks up to the podium to receive the prize, and says: ‘MerTHHHHHi beaucoup.’

Moral: if you don’t practise in ‘real operating conditions’, you might as well not practice at all. Or, as Gatbonton and Segalowitz (1988: 486) put it ‘the [practice] activity should be designed to allow learners to experience some of the normal psychological pressures felt by people engaged in real communication.’

9. Multilingualism

A mouse is in his mouse hole and he wants to go out to get something to eat, but he’s afraid there might be a big cat outside, so he puts his ear by the opening and all he hears is “Bow Wow” so he thinks, “Well, there can’t be a cat out there because there’s a big old dog”, so he goes out of his mouse hole and is promptly caught and eaten by a cat, who licks his lips and says “It’s good to be bilingual !!”

Which makes a nice story, but I suspect that even a mouse would be able to tell a non-native barker from a native one.

_______

¹ cited in Evans, V. 2014. The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge University Press.

² Weigand, 1999 – quoted in House, J., Kasper, G., & Ross, S. (eds) 2003. Misunderstandings in Social Life: Discourse approaches to problematic talk. London: Pearson.

L is for Language

At Easter it’s our custom (more out of nostalgia than out of any sense of religiosity, it has to be said) to listen to the Lebanese singer Fayrouz singing traditional Easter songs from that region.

Here’s a taster:

http://youtu.be/mmr1KR9kDUc

What language is she singing in, though?

Reading the comments thread on the YouTube site is revealing:

In a new book, Suresh Canagarajah (2013) reminds us that this blending, mixing and meshing of languages, rather than being the exception, is the norm. Quoting Pattanayak (1984), he cites the example of south Asia, to the effect that, ‘if one draws a straight line between Kashmir and Kanyakumari and marks, say, every five or ten miles, then one will find that there is no break in communication between any two consecutive points.’ That is to say, a message passed down the line would reach its destination, irrespective of all the languages it traverses.

Nor is this linguistic intermingling and hybridization a purely Asian or Middle Eastern phenomenon. ‘All spaces are contact zones’ says Canagarajah (2013: 26), a view echoed in a recent article by Sewell (2013: 6):

It is important to appreciate that all language use – among whatever combination or grouping of native and non-native speakers – is situated, variable, and subject to hybridizing influences.

This has never been more true than now, where immigration, tourism, and globalization, among other influences, coerce communication between speakers of different languages, with all the blendings, fusions, pidgins and macaronics that result. However much the ‘language police’ struggle to enforce the integrity of languages like (to choose a local example) Catalan, their efforts are foredoomed.

It’s not just that languages vary from region to region; they vary from person to person – and even within one person. As Labov (1969, 2003: 234) long ago pointed out:  ‘One of the fundamental principles of sociolinguistic investigation might simply be stated as: There are no single-style speakers. By this we mean that every speaker will show some variation in phonological and syntactic rules according to the immediate context in which he is speaking.’

The fact of the matter is that none of us speaks the same language. Nor even a language. As Pennycook (2012: 98) argues,  ‘None of us speaks “a language” as if this were an undifferentiated whole. We do not learn languages as if these were discrete listings of syntax and lexicon (despite what years of schooling and tests may try to tell us). Rather, we learn how to do certain things with words, and with varying success.’

And, from a psycholinguistic view, too, as Block (2003: 39) argues, all is flux:

Linguistic competence is not stored in the mind in neat compartments with clear boundaries; rather, a more appropriate image is that of a mass with no clear divisions among parts.  Nor is linguistic competence in different languages stable over time as there is constant bleeding between and among languages as well as additions and losses in terms of repertoires.

Thus, the idea that we are primed to speak a preordained language from birth has given way to the ‘complex systems’ view that language acquisition is the ‘soft assembly’ of meaning-making resources, or what Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 17) call ‘a “statistical ensemble” of interacting elements… constantly changing’.  They add that ‘learning is not the taking in of linguistic forms by learners, but the constant adaptation of their linguistic resources in the service of meaning-making in response to the affordances that emerge in the communicative situation, which is, in turn, affected by the learners’ adaptability’ (2008: 135).

By these accounts, is it any longer valid to talk about ‘a language’ or ‘languages’ (countable) as opposed to simply ‘language’ (uncountable)? Canagarajah (2013: 6) thinks not:

“Languages” are always in contact with and mutually influence each other. From this perspective, the separation of languages with different labels needs to be problematized. Labelling is an ideological act of demarcating certain codes in relation to certain identities and interests.

So, to fence a language off and give it a name (Aramaic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syrian, and so on) is less a linguistic decision than a political one, although, as Bourdieu (1992: 45) warns, linguists are often complicit:

To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept the official definition of the official language of a political unit. This language is the one which, within the territorial limits of that unit, imposes itself on the whole population as the only legitimate language.

And, in order to legitimate it, squadrons of lexicographers and grammarians are recruited, not only to describe and prescribe the language, but to circumscribe it. But where do you set the limits? Where does one language end and another begin?  In a recent review of a history of the Oxford English Dictionary (Hitchings, 2013: 7), the reviewer notes that

When [the dictionary’s editor, James Murray] asked members of the Philological Society, ‘At which Englishman’s speech does English terminate?’, he drew criticism for his unwillingness to provide an exact answer. One reason for doing so was his awareness that the British Empire was expanding. Murray and his paymasters differed on the question of how this should be recognised.

The same question might well be asked of any so-called language. At which Spaniard’s speech does Spanish terminate? At which Croatian’s speech does Croatian terminate? And so on.

So, if there are no languages, only language, what is it that we teach? Or, as Pennycook (2010: 132) puts it, ‘The question to ask is what language education might look like if we no longer posited the existence of separate languages.’

The short answer, perhaps, is that we would facilitate a kind of creative DIY approach – semiotic bricolage, perhaps – by means of which learners would become resourceful language users, cutting and pasting from the heteroglossic landscape to meet both their short-term and their long-term goals. Maybe it also means that we can dispense with the need to ‘teach the grammar’ of the language: if the language does not have a fixed shape, neither does the grammar that infuses it.

Or, as Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 198-9) sum it up:

Language as a separate entity is a normative fiction…; it only exists in the fluxes of language use in a given speech community. For the language classroom this implies that what has previously been taken as the goal of learning, the “target language”, ceases to exist in any simple form…. Inside the language classroom, the dynamics of language-using by teachers and students leads to the emergence of individual learners’ growing language resources and of classroom dialects, and, beyond the classroom, to the emergence of lingua franca varieties.

No longer are we Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. Rather, Teachers of Language as a Semiotic Resource, perhaps.

References:

Block, D. (2003) The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Canagarajah, S. (2013) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations, London: Routledge.

Hitchings, H. (2013) ‘At which Englishman’s speech does English terminate?’, a review of Ogilvie, S. (2012) Words of the World: A global history of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’ Cambridge, in London Review of Books, 7 March 2013.

Labov, W. 1969. ‘Some sociolinguistic principles’. Reprinted in Paulston, C.B., & Tucker, G.R. (eds.) (2003) Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell.

Larsen-Freeman, D. & Cameron, L. (2008) Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pennycook,  A. (2010) Language as Local Practice, London: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (2012) Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Sewell, A (2013) ‘English as a lingua franca: ontology and ideology’, ELT Journal, 67/1.