My Father and Bidialectalism

This week’s selections, Unequal Partnership by Rickford and The Paradox of the Universal Triangle by Lupyan, introduce two very separate subjects: in Rickford, we learn about the contributions AAVE has made to modern linguistics, or rather the contributions which linguists have been able to make only thanks to AAVE; in Lupyan, we learn about the role language plays in prototyping and state relationships in our cognitive neural state space.

I found Rickford’s look into AAVE particularly interesting when he describes grammaticalization, the process by which a semantic element is incorporated into the syntax of a language, and stylistic variation, for the variability of which the preferred explanation seems to lie in varying the speaker’s audience – a speaker will change the way s/he speaks based on the environment (e.g. individual vs peer interviews).

It would be interesting to investigate which parts of speech allow for the influx of any new syntactically significant terms, as well as which parts of speech are contenders to be chosen for such a role.

This notion of impressions also brings to mind what Rickford says about the failure of Bridge. I completely understand why many in the African-American community were less than pleased with the program. Because AAVE is so stigmatized against the traditionally correct SE, it seems a patronizing attempt to guide urban youth away from the dialect every inner city, Black child may have been exposed to, which understandably fails to garner much sympathy from a decent number of African-American intellectuals. Even with statistical support for its methods, Bridge was fighting an uphill battle, which is why the rules Rickford outlines to guide effective service should be followed in the field.

My father is half Native-Hawaiian and roughly half Chinese, was born and raised on the island of Oahu, and as such grew up hearing and speaking an English heavily influenced by Hawaiian Pidgin English. He left Hawai’i to study at the University of Washington, and there was able to develop for himself a more polished Standard English. Now, I would say he is fluently bidialectal, as he has been for many years, and as is evident whenever we as a family visit Hawai’i – he switches between one and the other depending on whom he is speaking with. Friend’s from high school? Non-standard dialect. Tourists and people from the mainland? Standard dialect.

Lupyan determines that only with language are we able to render certain abstract concepts as distinct from specific instances of each concept. A triangle is different from a three sided figure even though the two describe the same constraints imposed on a geometric shape. This parallels an interesting observation in semantics, where the logical equivalent of one expression gives off certain differentiable connotations.