Dear SLICE friends

The reason I for once am in advance with our end-of-month newsletter is that Stef Grondelaers asked me this night to forward the below invitation – which includes a very urgent deadline.

It is an invitation to submit a paper to a panel at the upcoming ICLaVE 8.

The invitation is open to all kinds of people, both the experimentally oriented and the qualitatively oriented (SLICE has no affirmative action programme), but in the interest of having a balanced panel, Stef says that experimental people should feel particularly invited. He also says that the deadline for abstracts can be postponed till Friday evening, but asks you to write to him as soon as you know your intention to submit.

Best wishes from Copenhagen

Tore

https://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/research/slice/

Dear colleague,

On behalf of Jürgen Jaspers (ULB Brussels) and myself, I would like to invite you to submit a paper to a panel we’re currently organizing for ICLaVE 8, which will take place in Leipzig from 27.5 to 29.5.2015. 

The panel is provisionally called “Quantitative and qualitative approaches to language (de)standardization.” An extensive description and a list of possible topics (feel free to propose others which are within the scope of the proposal) is appended below; since time is of the essence (we have to submit by August 31, which is next weekend), could you please tell us whether you’re interested in joining the panel, and whether you’re willing and able to submit an abstract of maximum 500 words (see the abstract submission guidelines on http://conference.uni-leipzig.de/iclave8/ abstract_submission.html) by next Thursday (so that Jürgen and I can finalize the proposal)? We know we are frightfully late, but we expect the topic to be well within your province, and we assume you may be interested in attending ICLaVE 8.

Many thanks in advance for considering this & we very much hope to see you in Leipzig next year!

All best,

Stef (also for Jürgen)

Quantitative and qualitative approaches to language (de)standardization In the last decades, the alleged "destandardization’ in many European languages (Deumert & Vandenbussche 2003; Kristiansen & Grondelaers 2013) has spawned a great number of quantitative (experimental) and qualitative (discourse-analytic) investigations into the perceptual factors that are believed to motor (standard) language change. While qualitative methods have always been on the agenda in addition to experimental investigations of language perception (Knops & van Hout 1988; Garrett 2005), it is fairly typical for the somewhat indifferent – to put it mildly – relationship between these methods that the concerted interest in (de)standardization has scarcely brought about any rapprochement, let alone co-operation. This workshop intends to facilitate such a détente in order to demonstrate that both perspectives are needed to obtain an accurate picture of the current dynamics in present-day standard languages.

Quantitative approaches usually rely on the speaker evaluation design (pioneered in Lambert et al. 1966), in which participants evaluate speech clips (representing a number of language or speech varieties) on adjectival scales which delimit the dimensions on which the clips/varieties perceptually vary; speaker evaluation experiments are rigidly controlled to exclude non-relevant perception triggers which obscure the manipulated variable, and they usually rely on replication to determine cross-contextual social meanings (typically prestige) which (co)-determine the production vitality of non-standard variants or varieties. While speaker evaluation designs have uncovered perceptual motivations for a great number of non-standard phenomena, more qualitatively inclined researchers deplore their limited contextual sensitivity, and their insistence on invariant social meanings.

Qualitative analysis comes in a number of shapes. In accordance with the view that “one of the most visible manifestation(s) of ideology is language use or discourse, which may reflect, construct, and/or maintain ideological patterns” (Verschueren 2012: 17), discourse-analytic approaches such as Van Hoof & Jaspers (2012) build on  primary sources (such as the post-war propagandistic documents issued by language planners) to uncover standard language ideology (change). A second brand of qualitative analysis proposes interactional micro-analysis in convergence with the idea that the social meaning of linguistic features is relative to the unfolding interaction in a specific context, and liable to significant recalibration when features are transferred across different contexts: “the same semiotic acts (…) mean very different things in different environments” (Blommaert 2005:172). Quantitative researchers, however, deplore the empirical austerity such approaches involve, and question the relation between the proposed examples and the discourses these are said to exemplify.        

The (de)standardization processes which are taking place in a number of European languages have turned out to be an uncommonly exciting arena for quantitative and qualitative accounts, though both make different assessments and predictions. In Flanders for example, experimental investigations such as Grondelaers, Van Hout & Speelman (2011) support the idea of a standard language vacuum, with an ideologically dominant and prestigious, but non-vital standard, and an increasingly vital though overtly depreciated vernacular variety called Tussentaal (“in-between language”, on account of its stratificational position in-between the dialects and the standard). In view of the fact that the increasing vitality of Tussentaal is supported by modern, dynamic prestige perceptions, Grondelaers & Van Hout (2011) and Grondelaers & Speelman (2013) predict destandardization (the demise of the official standard), and restandardization (of Tussentaal).

Qualitative investigations such as Van Hoof and Jaspers (2012), by contrast, conclude that linguistic standardization has “succeeded in creating a collective meta-linguistic consciousness and in thoroughly imbuing the Flemish with the propagated language stratification in which linguistic features are associated with a social hierarchy of speakers and speech situations” (p. 113, our translation). Crucially, Van Hoof and Jaspers (2012: 113) suggest that this deeply engrained ideology has not changed drastically in the meantime, not even on account of the clearly increasing production of Tussentaal: “for many Flemings, it is […] quite normal to manifest a Tussentaal-like practice and, at the same time, to subscribe unequivocally to the necessity of the use, the conservation, and the defence of the standard” (p. 120, our translation). As a consequence, Jaspers & Van Hoof qualify the current Flemish standard language situation as a case of “late standardization”, in which standardizing and vernacularising forces are intertwining and conditioning each-other, rather than cancelling each-other out.

Such diverging predictions from quantitative and qualitative approaches are not entirely exceptional in current (de)standardization research (compare, for example, Kristiansen’s (2002, 2009) experimental accounts of de- and restandardization in Danish with linguistic-ethnographic work by Madsen (2013) and Stæhr (2014), or experimental accounts of destandardization in the UK with Rampton’s (2006) insistence on the continuing relevance of a Cockney-‘posh’ dyad in adolescent speech practices). Does this divergence result simply from the different methodologies, from the micro- or macroscopic focus, or from (ideologically determined) different meta-beliefs? This workshop invites perception researchers of different methodological colours to compare, explore and learn from each other’s work with a view to explain the current state of linguistic (de)standardization and language change processes across Europe. 

 Some research questions:

• How can we reconcile the increasing success of vernacular language use in public discourse with the apparently continuing relevance of standard language ideology? What data sources do we need to unravel the underlying processes?
• How can quantitative analysis become heuristically more sensitive to the relation between contextual and cross-contextual social meaning, so as to arrive at better characterizations of standard and non-standard language variants and varieties? An interesting case in point is the delineation of the emergent vernacular variety of Flemish Dutch, which experimental linguists refer to as Tussentaal (implying that this label corresponds to a delineable variety), while qualitative linguists refer to it as “Mixed Dutch” (which challenges the notion of a single variety).
• How can we open up (or facilitate) qualitative case study research to experimental researchers, and, vice versa, experimental research to case study researchers?
• More particularly: to what extent can quantitative and qualitative approaches of linguistic standardization inform each other and take account of the limitations they mutually perceive in one another?
• What useful combinations of quantitative and qualitative work can be produced with regard to (de)standardization?
• What guidelines, if any, can we propose as to the relevance of a single (quantitative/qualitative) or mixed approach in the study of (de)standardization?
• What types of data can be usefully included by researchers working on either side of the quantitative/qualitative divide?