Complexity in the Relation between British and American English. William A Kretzschmar, Jr. University of Georgia University of Oulu

Transcription

1 Complexity in the Relation between British and American English William A Kretzschmar, Jr. University of Georgia University of Oulu

2 WAK 2002: melting pot vs. mixing bowl the best solution to explain the historical and social as well as the linguistic facts is that the American colonies represented a melting pot of linguistic features overall, out of which different localities eventually created a new mixing bowl of regional voices. We see that linguistic features were retained from the habits of individual speakers, but not whole linguistic systems from constituent immigrant languages or dialects. The default condition for English in the colonies in the seventeenth century was not "London standard" (whatever that could have meant given the great population mobility of the time), but instead a pool of linguistic features collected from a radically mixed settlement population

3 WAK 1996 s question Knowledge of the exact composition of the colonial immigrant population, area by area, even if we could obtain it, might suggest how some features could have entered American English, but it would not tell us why some features became established and others did not, or why some features were maintained in some places but not in others.

4 Immigration and settlement 150,000 migrants from all parts of Britain in 17 th century (Bailyn 1986) 80%-95% of Native American population lost to disease Remainder displaced by catastrophe, violence Thus, a pattern of replacement of the native population and limitation of influence on language

5 English settlers to North America Also subject to catastrophe: Half of the Pilgrims died during the first winter Two-thirds of Jamestown settlers died during the bad winter of 1609 child mortality in the Chesapeake region was 50 per cent before the age of twenty

6 Bailyn vs. Fischer Bailyn: The population that spread inland from coastal nodes to form new communities was a composite of ethnic and religious groups--germans, French, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, Africans, Afro- Americans--carrying with them different cultural baggage.... There was no single "American" pattern of family and community organization. There were many patterns, reflecting the variety of human sources from which the population had been recruited and the swiftly changing, fluid situations in which the people lived. Fischer section titles like "East Anglia to Massachusetts," "The South of England to Virginia"

7 Principles of speech as a complex system 1) the continuum of linguistic behavior 2) extensive (really massive) variation in all features at all times 3) importance of proximity 4) differential frequency as a key factor Emergent order from the complex system is shared linguistic production

8 Non-linear distribution Survey items always make an asymptotic hyperbolic curve: the A-curve. A few very frequent responses, many less frequent (the long tail) Atlas Thunderstorm data showing A-curve Series1

9 The 80/20 Rule (here, 90/10, for thunderstorm) Series % tokens 10%types 10% tokens 90%types

10 Scaling: 10K, 100K, 1M Web links

11 Scaling: bureau curves for All LAMSAS, New York State, Women

12 Schneider's Postcolonial English Cambridge University Press, 2007 Dynamic Model, five phases Foundation of the colony Stabilization around the outside norm Nativization Formation of an internal norm Diversification

13 Holland on agent-based modeling We define (for the computer and ourselves) 1) the state of the system 2) the possible operations, given the condition of each element in the system 3) a set of rules governing operations 4) agents, who apply rules to the input state and realize the output state of the system We process many iterations of states to observe emergent behavior in the system.

14 Mitchell on cellular automata A cellular automaton is a grid (or lattice) of cells, where a cell is a simple unit that turns on or off in response to the states in its local neighborhood.... A cell update rule is simply the identical rule followed by each cell, which tells the cell what its state should be at the next time step.

15 LAMSAS grid ( two partials) yy 2 yyyy 3 yyyy 4 yyyyy 5 yyyyyy 6 yyyyyyy 7 yyyyyyyyy 8 ppyyyyyyyyyyyy 9 ppyyyypppppyyyyyy 10 pppppppppppyyyyy 1 ppppppppppjjjj 2 ppppppppppjjjj 30 NnnnnnnNnnnnnnn 1 nnnnnsssssssssn 2 GggssSsSSSSSSs 3 gggggssssssss 4 gggggsssssss 5 ggggggssssss 6 ggggggss 7 GggggGgS 8 gggggg 9 g 40 gg

16 A cellular automaton for the Atlas

17 Thanks for your patience! Selected References Holland, John Emergence: From Chaos to Order. New York: Basic Books. Kretzschmar, William A., Jr Isoglosses and Predictive Modeling. American Speech 67 (1992), Kretzschmar, William A., Jr The Linguistics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Melanie Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, Edgar Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.