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aol.com>Just a few things to elicit comment: One of the things that most interests me about this discussion is that no one has treated the matter of so-called "small nations". Native speakers of languages concentrated in relatively small geographic areas, and that have only a few million speakers (or less) live in a completely different linguistic universe than speakers of "world languages", like English, Spanish or French. Few foreigners penetrate their cultures (even if they reside among them!), their adult compatriots return from abroad with markedly diminished skills in their native tongue (just ask a Czech how tennis player Ivan Lendl -- or even their own Aunt Klara in Canada -- talks), more than likely their language and/or nation has been subject to one or more prolonged attempts at deportation or extermination (in Eastern Europe usually at the hands of the Germans or Russians), and their language may have been revived or reconstructed at some point in its history. Considering the effects of these and other matters, the issue of minority language rights in these countries (especially when today's minority was yesterday's colonizing majority) cannot necessarily be discussed in terms easily comprehensible in larger language communities. What do members of such "small nations" think about this issue? Another question: When does accommodation of language rights become the promotion of a privileged linguistic minority? I'm thinking of places like Detroit, where the largest numbers of linguistically unassimilated residents are likely to speak Arabic, Polish or Ukrainian, but the bilingual signs in federal offices are in English and Spanish. (My statistics may be faulty in this particular case, but I think the question remains valid.) And further: When does accommodation of minority language speakers become unwieldy and absurd? How many languages can be fully accommodated in one country before the whole thing crushes under its own bureaucratic weight? I once saw an article in an Esperanto publication that advocated forcing the adoption of that language by international bodies through gradual insistence on the language rights of every single member nation -- no matter how small -- until the organizations could not function without adopting a "neutral" language. This is obvious hyperbole (though maybe not for the article's author), but it seems that linguists always complain when there's not enough accommodation but they never venture a guess as to when (to use Popeye's famous words) "enough is to much". Speaking pragmatically, when must a consensus language finally be settled on for offical purposes? James KirchnerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>Content-Length: 10243 HOW MUCH SHORTER THAN A SECOND? I didn't want to get involved in the controversy over Armey's alleged tongue slip, because I never actually heard it -- only the following flap. However, I do have to admit I was skeptical of Armey's "explanation". Like many of the discussants so far, I found it difficult to believe that Frank + harangue ==) Fag + ? (I wonder where the sonorants went?), even assuming that Armey's use of the term "blend" in his explanation might suggest that his basic intro to language course was not the highpoint of his educational career. So I tend to agree with the suggestions that the word "fag" was somehow on Armey's mind, whether by choice or not. That's where the "disingenuity" or "ingenuity" lies -- certainly not in his explanation. The issue of "less than a second" is the one that most interests me in terms of slips of the tongue and self-corrections. As an old hand at measuring spectrograms, my impression has been that "immediate" (unreflecting --) honest?) self-corrections indeed occur in less than a second. Very much less than a second -- about one fifth of a second. Spectrographic measurement is very precise in this respect. We could do accuracy to hundredths of a second with no problems here, but I don't think response time in self-correction requires such accuracy. Fifths (maybe even tenths) of a second, on the other hand, I suspect are quite meaningful in deciding whether a self-correction is "normal" or not, or in trying to do some interpretive analysis of it. (It may depend on whether SOME -- actually MOST -- self-corrections are controlled at will or not. I doubt most examples of immediate corrections could have been self-suppressed.) My impression of duration is based on measuring certain aspects of spontaneous speech behaviour for various reasons. One was an interest in the nature of different kinds of pauses. For example, I found that the use of the term "pause" for most syntactic junctures, even clauses, is a fiction. There is no measurable pause. It's usually ONLY the intonational patterns which acoustically signal such junctures (both in English and Swahili at least). So, junctural "pause" seems to be misnomer when used by the analysts I have in mind -- feeding my suspicion that their "intutions" are based on their literacy, maybe even to the point of confusing their reading styles or understanding of punctuation marks with how they usually speak. I say this just to indicate one of my interests in pauses -- one that has to do with syntactic boundaries. More relevant to the Armey controversy is self-correction of speech errors, where the error violates the phonological integrity of a lexical item. There, my impression is that stammering and self-correction of blends are similar, about a fifth of a second. (And I don' t remember it mattering whether the initial error is fully articulated, or aborted before completion, the latter being more common in both cases, I think). I have measured some of these for my purposes, e.g., to distinguish them from more reflective pauses and to compare them with such things as repetitions as in adult arguments where somebody is interrupted but fights to keep the floor by recycling a word or phrase which is not being acknowledged by a conflicting speaker. I have an article somewhere where my examples from transcription actually give the length of pauses in deci-seconds. (Note that Schegloff's, Ochs' or ot her ethnographic-type transcriptions are unlikely to provide further data because they only measure long pauses -- at least a second -- without needing instrumental analysis. These are reflective or submissive pauses, NEVER pauses for self-correction of pronunciation accidents -- difficulty in pronouncing unfamiliar words is a separate matter, as are some planned "accidents", say in jokes, where the effect is intentional) Let me hasten to add that my impressions are based on limited study, that is, not on systematic study of DURATION in various kinds of pause phenomena for the sake of taxonomic classification. So one should only take my observations as suggestive, not au thoritative -- if you wanna make a federal case out of it. I haven't indulged much in the speech error literature -- though I have scanned Vicky Fromkin's book from the 70s (which she kindly gave me a copy of at that time). So I don't know whether the kinds of duration measurements I am suggesting here have been studied. It would not surprise me if they have not, since the literature seems to be more about kinds of errors and what that's supposed to prove about linguistic structure, than about kinds of recoveries from errors (self-corrections) and what that suggests about different kinds of speech processing and planning. Hesitation markers such as glottal stop (the shortest and I think most common one), er, uh, uhm, shit, I mean, excuse me, etc. are also obviously relevant phenomena that can occur between a speech accident and a self-correction. Their different durations, not to mention their content when they have any, might be relevant to making inferences about the causes of what they purport to correct. To conclude, I am suggested in perhaps an awkward way that issues like what's with Armey's slip and how to distinguish various kinds of SELF-CORRECTION could profit from systematic research on frequency and timing of self-corrections in speech. Yes, Virginia, there is a science being suggested here. FOOTNOTE: Since the early 80s at least, differences in the READING errors with or without correction made by fluent, as opposed to non-fluent, readers, pioneered by the Goodmans, is an area ripe for comparison with spontaneous speech errors and self-corrections -- and could become another tool for the pro secution, lest some (other?) demagogue and his (her?) speech writers decide that they can get away with constructing a slur which metathesises or otherwise plays on some "innocent" phrase -- now that Armey's example has established a precedent, cf. knee-jerk liberal --) ?neo-liberal jerk, radical right --) ?riotable rat, preservative kick (-- ? Smarmy apology irks/ Armey apology smirks. For those who can't read between the lines, Armey as a "precedent" is sarcastic. Surely someone out there has collected such "errors", without judging whether they are intentional or not. I once read on a record jacket that the pianist Alfred Brendel has a hobby of collecting examples of "unintentional humor". You out there, Alf? Anyway, I hardly have ever had a flash of insight so uniquely brilliant that someone else has not been able to immediately give me a hundred examples of the phenomena from their own observations. Benefit of the doubtfully yours, BenjiMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue