by Schegloff

Don't call them interruptions. Call them overlap or simultaneous talk.

Hitches in the turn-taking may be marked by louder speech, higher pitch, or faster speech. SOmetimes speakers let their speech be long and dran-out to wait for the end of someone's simulaneous talk.

Post-resolution hitches are common and include nervousness (repetition), pauses and drawn-out speech.

• Overlapping Talk and the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation

• Emanuel A. Schegloff
• Language in Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 1-63
  

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Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

Review: African American English and the Composition Classroom

review by David west brown

praises the book in general, but has two caveats: register is a far more complicated issue than the authors make it out to be, and cite Hillocks and Smith 1986 as proof of that sentence-combining is useful in teaching grammar.

The book is fair and balanced, written for the layperson, and makes complex ideas accessible to teachers.

Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Eckert

We cannot consider gender an independent variable, but must consider it in relation to other variations such as socioeconomic status, identity, and regional variation.

Eckert challenged Labov's generalization that women's speech is more conservative than men's by examining two groups of white teenagers at a Detroit high school. The groups were the jocks and the burnouts, who together accounted for about half the school's populations.

Eckert examined phonological variation among jock and burnout males and females. She found that there was a complex relationship between nonstandard vowels and identity, concluding that we cannot look at gender differences without examining the communities of practice in which the women and men use language.

Sex-based differences in compliment behavior

by Herbert
1990

Americans, more than other English-speaking nationalities, use compliments to negotiate social relationships; Americans are more apt to disagree or downplay a compliment than South Africans. Our compliments seem insincere to other nationalities because the compliment is not actually ABOUT the item or the wearer, but about negotiation of relationships.

American women give more compliments than American men. When men compliment men or women, the addressee is more likely to accept the compliment and say thank you. WHen women compliment women, the addressee is more likely to give some other response, like a history of the item.

Checking Theory and the Dative Subject Constructions in Japanese and Korean

hiroyuki ura

Goes over how dative constructions display subjecthood, and also how in some respects they do not seem to be subjects.

He (or she?) refers to Chomsky often. He never conclusively says whether or not dative subject constructions are really dative subjects or not.

Korean dative experiencers: The evidence for their status as surface subjects

gerdts and youn respond back to moore and perlmutter. They say that the Korean data does not yield the same result as Russian. They say that Korean datives obey all 5 tests for subjecthood.

What does it take to be a dative subject?

In response to gerdts & youn, Moore and Perlmutter said that there are two datives that linguists have been confusing: “the surface subject is the dative case” and “dative-marked nominal” that behaves like a subject but really isn’t one. They call the second type I-nominals and they fail to behave like subjects. They analyze Russian.

Korean Psych Constructions: Advancement or retreat?

Gerdts and Youn said that “Advancement—not Retreat—is the preferred analysis of Korean Psych constructions.”

Intensive and quotative all: something old, something new

by Rickford et al.

"the intensifier all is not new but has expanded in syntactic environments." quotative all is new and dates from CA in the 80s.

Intensifier all has been used since Old English, but has recently expanded its usage to before full verbs.

Rickford believed that quotative all was on the decline after peaking in the 1990s (I think he's probably wrong here).

In their corpus they found the most frequent intensifiers were: really- 52.3%, so- 18.9%, very- 9.4%, all- 7.4%, totally- 2.7%.

"intensifier all most frequently modifies present participles, PPs, and adjectives..."

Quotative all was the most frequent quotative among CA teenagers in 1990 and 1994, accounting for 45.9%. Quotative like: 17.5%. Unframed quotes: 15.9%. Say: 10.6%

All was much less likely to occur in 2005. Like: 69.3%. Say: 12%. Unframed: 10.7%. all: 4.3.%

Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language

by tagliamonte and denis in toronto

The authors studied thousands of IMs gathered from teen mentees in Toronto and analyzed quotatives, future modals, and abbreviations stereotyped as being IM language. The authors found that "Contrary to
expectation, speech has a more innovative profile in comparison to IM. The
incoming forms so, be like, and have to are all more frequent in the speech
data. At the same time, speech tends to be more vernacular, containing
higher rates of going to than will. In contrast, IM language is consistently more
varied, exhibiting a wider range of variants than speech and, in particular,
containing a higher proportion of standard forms than speech."

Haha is more commonly used than lol, despite popular perceptions.

Tagliamonte says that the "language police" are exaggerating the amount of lols and colloquialisms in IM speech and that IM speech has the same linguistic variation and change as written and spoken language.

It is a register where people can fuse formal and colloquial language and therefore is a free space, ripe for language innovation.