Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 4, Issue 1, 1978

In the introduction of this paper the author discusses the relevance of sociolinguistic research for Belgium. In this respect he mentions the problems of the pacification between the language communities in the Brussels area and the relation between dialect and standard language in Flanders. In this paper he mainly deals with the latter problem which is discussed along the following lines:a. Who speaks in Flanders what variety (dialect or standard Dutch) to whom and when? (cf Fishman; research by Meeus and Geerts, Nootens and Van den Broeck).b. What attitude do the Flemish show towards the Dutch used by the Flemish as compared to the Dutch used by the Dutch? What do they eventually reject in the Dutch as used by Dutch speakers? (Attitu-des, cf. Lambert & Giles, research by Geerts, Nootens and Van den Broeck and by Deprez).c. Problems of standardisation ("the long road to the standard Dutch") illustrated by some concrete lexical and pronominal (jij-gij) variables, ("linguistic insecurity", cf. Labov; research by Deprez and Geerts in Kortrijk-Poperinge).d. The relation between the dimension of dialect/standard language and the code-theory of Bernstein; research by Van den Broeck of the syntactic complexity in the actual use of both standard language and dialect by workers and middleclass in Maaseik (Bernstein, Labov, Ammon).

F. Jansen:The relation between potential and realised constructions as measuring problem in the sociolinguistic approach of syntaxThis paper aims at drawing attention to some differences between words and sentences which make a sociolinguistic investigation into syntactic variation more difficult than quantitative research into phonological variation. To begin with there are several theoretical problems with syntactic rules compared with optional phonological rules.However, the greater part of the paper is directed toward more practical problems, the importance of which is demonstrated by presenting the results of a quantitative sociolinguistic investi-gation into the correlation of the frequency of Left Dislocation in spoken Dutch with 'classic' sociolinguistic conditioning factors such as class, sex and style.The conclusions are: (i) that sociolinguists should take into account the distinctions made in theoretical linguistics, and (ii) that beside these distinctions, there are other, even less studied, factors, such as complex internal structure of the NP, which may have a considerable influence on the frequency' of a construction

The concept of 'attitude' is adopted from social psychology. Sociolinguis-tics can be criticized for having 'borrowed' this term without taking into consideration its theoretical background and implications. No serious attempts have been made to develop a theory of language attitudes. This means that(1) we do not know the mental processes which underlie the formation of language attitudes;(2) we have to ask ourselves wether the methods used in sociolinguistic research really measure language attitudes and(3) wether the interpretations of the results are correct;(4) we do not know much on the societal conditions which influence the formation of language attitudes, in other words the development and function of language attitudes within a speech community are unclear.Whereas with regard to the last question we have to consult the 'sociology of knowledge', the first three questions, which are discussed in this paper, need the help of social psychology.'Language attitude' is defined as a 'learned predisposition of the language user to respond consistently favourably or unfavourably with regard to a language (variety, form)1. Most social psychologists regard 'attitude' as consisting of two components, a cognitive one and an evaluative of affec-tive one. If the attitude object is some linguistic form the language user can relate it to (a) the linguistic variety that it belongs to; (b) the geographical area in which it is spoken; (c) the social class by which it is spoken. These are his 'beliefs' on language. With these beliefs can be associated other beliefs about the geographical area or social class in question. The sum of all these beliefs forms the cognitive component of the person's language attitude. All these attributes are related to emotional values. All these values together form the evaluational or affective com-ponent of the language attitude. In order to investigate language atti-tudes we have to account for both components. Measuring only the evalua-tional component does not provide us with any insights into underlying belief structure, from beliefs only we cannot infer a person's attitude.Though many social psychologists describe a third conative component to attitude, which is related to behaviour, the relation between attitude and behaviour has long been an unsolved problem because of the apparent discrepancy between them. Two models by which it is possible to explain this relation are discussed here: that of FISHBEIN & AJZEN 1975 and that of ROKEACH 1972. Fishbein & Ajzen regard (intentions to) behaviour as a function of a persona attitude toward the consequences of the behaviour and his subjective norm (SN) consisting of "the preceived expectations of specific referent individuals or groups'* and the motivation to comply.What can be criticized in this model is that (a) the attitude toward the consequences of the behaviour is dependent on SN and (b) that such defi-nition of 'attitude' hardly allows generalization and is of little expla-natory power.Rokeach sees behaviour as a function of attitude toward an object and attitude toward the situation in which the object is placed. Our modified version of this model implies that a language user has (1) an attitude toward a language (variety, form) such as described earlier and (2) an attitude toward a speech situation, i.e. he knows the norms by which it is dominated (normative beliefs) and he relates, once more, emotional values to these norms and other 'attributes' they are associated with. Normative beliefs and their evaluation are highly dependent on what he knows and feels about language and its regional and social identity. If his atti-tude deviates from the generally accepted norm he will usually adapt to the norm if it is related to heavy sanctions; if it is not, he will behave according to his attitude.The implications of these social psychological theories for sociolinguis-tics are discussed. The most important points are:(1) Sociolinguistic research on "language attitudes" often deals with normative beliefs instead;(2) Other types of language attitude researchs are better called "opinion poll";(3)The use of standardized belief items (a) imposes stereotypes on the subjects, (b) cannot prove that people really hold these beliefs on language.(4) We still do not know which linguistic features evoke which reactions and why they do;(5) The lack of insight in the problem of attitude theory easily causes misinterpretations of sociolinguistix findings.Therefore, our suggestion is to work out a theoretical framework based on social psychology and sociology of knowledge, to reinterpret sociolinguis-tic findings and finally, to formulate new sociolinguistic research which could be more fundamental than it is now.

The methods and techniques used in sociolinguistics have been continually improved in recent years. Yet the claims that have been made about differences of degree between the language used by women and that used by men, are mostly based on the introspection method.This paper reports on a qualitative analysis of sex differences in language use by means of the observation method.On the basis of 587 utterances produced in buying a train ticket at the Central Station in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) has been investigated.vhether there is a statistically significant difference between women and men in certain aspects of their use of language which have been mentioned in the literature: the number of words to deal with a 8et task, diminutives9 civilities, forms of language expressing insecurity (repetitions, hesitations, sel f-corrections, requests for information), In addition to the independent variable of sex of speaker three other variables were introduced: sex of addressee, age of speaker (0-30, 35-60, 60+) and time of ticket purchase (rush hour or normal).The data were fed to the computer for processing according to programs of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. 2x2x2x3 ANOVAS (sex speaker ? sex adressee ? time of ticket purchase ? age speaker) were conducted to test the significance of the main effects and their interactions for all the dependent variables which were frequent enough to warrant further processing. The results indicate that there are few significant differences between the language used by women and that used by men in this particular situation, with regard to the variables mentioned above. As a consequence, this investigation has demonstrated once again that intuitions should be considered critically.It is remarkable, however, that sex of addressee does affect almost all of the variables under consideration: all of the kind of utterances that women are characteristically supposed to use more often than men -utterances indicating insecurity and politeness - were used more often by women and men when speaking to the male ticket-seller. Consequently these results strongly suggest that anyone who wants to investigate language by means of interviews must take into account the fact that the kind of language used does not depend only on the informant, but just as much on the addressee.

ABSTRACTThis research project dealt with the characteristics of Dutch Foreigner Talk (FT), that is, the way in which Dutch people talk to foreigners who speak little or no Dutch.The research was carried out in four parts:1. an investigation of the way in which FT appears in popular literature;2. a study of the intuitions of Dutch native speakers about FT;3. an analysis of conversations between Dutch speakers and foreigners who asked them the way on the street;4. an investigation of the interactions between foreigners and Dutch officials who dealt regularly with foreigners.We obtained the following results:a. FT occurs fairly frequently in Dutch, i.e. speech to foreigners often differs from ordinary speech; frequency of occurrence of FT varies greatly from situation to situation, and from conversation to conversation;b. Stereotypes exist concerning FT. From the study of intuitions it appeared that people often think that SOV word order, infinitives in-stead of inflected forms, and strong instead of weak pronouns are used, and that copulas, subject pronouns and articles are deleted;c. On specific points (SOV order and infinitives) the actual FT speech behaviour of native speakers, especially those who deal regularly with foreigners, deviates from the existing stereotypes;d. A number of specific FT characteristics appear to be strongly determined by the situation;e. Dutch FT is in several ways similar to FT in other languages, suggesting that certain universal simplifying tendencies may play a role in the production of FT.

In the first and second section of this paper some methodological topics in the study of interlanguage (IL) and error analysis are discussed. The author adheres to Adjemian's point of view (1976): any interlanguage is a natural language and contains a linguistic system. Its systematicity is therefore given a priori. However, not all utterances of an IL speaker might be consistent: some rules of the system might be unstable over a certain period of time. Research would have to show what performance strategies (like simplification) influence the stability of the system, in other words in what way the consistency of the system is permeable.In the third section a preliminary study is presented dealing with the topic of inconsistency in IL. The research question was: to what extent can the inconsistency in the learners' utterances be accounted for by distinguishing different kinds of performance? To nineteen adult foreigners in Holland, with 15 different mother tongues, all partici-pating in an intensive Dutch course for beginners, eight tests ^licitation procedures) were administered: two reproduction tests, four production tests and two "intuition tests" (see table I). Eight rules of Dutch syntax and morfology were tested, (table II). Results show that:(a) if someone makes one or more errors with a particular rule in a reproduction test, he will make one or more errors with the same rule in a production test and an intuition test as well: the reverse is not true;(b) if someone makes one or more errors with a particular rule in a production test, he will make one or more errors with the same rule in an intuition test as well; the reverse is not true;(c) the overlap in errors/correct forms was greatest with both repro-duction tests. Of the production tests translation and the anagram test were almost equally representative for the four tests. Finally, there was no congruence between both "intuition tests", the sentence correc-tion test yielding consistently more errors (for all eight rules) than the multiple choice test.

Autonomous Learning of Foreign Languages by Adults in the Netherlands:A UNESCO Research ProjectIn the field of foreign language learning there is a growing interest in the group of adult learners. As foreign language learning in school often does not provide students with all the knowledge and skill they need, many countries are looking for facilities for adults to brush up or to improve their skill in the languages they have learned at school and/or to learn other languages. The fact that most adults are often unable to attend language courses conducted by teachers, may force them to seek materials for self-instruction.The UNESCO is trying to obtain information on whether in Europe materials for autonomous foreign language learning are available and, if so, what criteria they meet. The UNESCO Secretariat has asked the French National Commission to prepare a critical study, with the help of a research group of the Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint Cloud (Audio-Visuel Centre), of the forms of autodidaxy and semi-autonomy in the field of foreign language learning in Europe. This research pro-ject involves English, French, Spanish and Russian and was carried out in Great Britain, France, Spain, URSS, Sweden and the Netherlands. Dis-tance teaching by means of mass media as well as the issue of the efficiency of autonomous learning are not investigated.The sophisticated analysis grid developed for the sake of the evaluation of the materials and the systems, is perhaps the most im-portant aspect of this project.The information received with the aid of this analysis grid, shows that in the Netherlands the materials are rather inadequate.

The general question to be answered in this study, and to be reported in this talk,reads: is there a transfer of cognitive structure from mother tongue to second language?As far as the construction of the vocabulary in a foreign language is concerned, the question means: does this process go just like the construction of the Ll-vocabulary (no transfer), or is the L2 vocabulary directly from the beginning onwards stored in a structure similar to the structure resulting from the process of aquiring the mother tongue (transfer)? If transfer takes place from the beginnings then simple English words have to be stored by speakers of Dutch, beginning to learn English, in the same way as by native English speakers, if and only if both groups have in their mother tongue the same cognitive structures at their disposal.In the experiment thirty Dutch children participated, 13-15 years of age, who had just started to learn English, and an equal number of English/Dutch bilingual children of similar age.There were two experimental tasks 1) the sorting task: based on similarity in meaning twenty cards (on every card a single word) had to be sorted in piles? 2} free recall: twenty words in random order were presented to the subject, after which he/she had to mention the words he could recall.The results were analysed in two separate ways; a) a"hierarchical clustering scheme" and b) an analysis of the degree to which the words were sorted together, res-pectively recalled as a function of the abstractness of the relationship that exists between those words.As predicted, the hypothesis that transfer does take place could not be falsified.

Confrontation with deviant, unexpected behavior often leads to uneasiness, uncertainty and fear, and, finally, to discrimination. People with speech defects or language disturbances are different because they sound different; they can even sound slightly frightening sometimes, but they are completely harmless and certainly not half-witted. This paper presents some general advice and some specific recommendations for encounters with those people. Generally: focus on the content of the conversation and try to forget what is wrong with the presentation; never raise your voice unnaturally; do not simulate understanding; if you want to help in cases of misunderstanding, paraphrase in simple words and short sentences what you think your partner intends to say; as far as your own speech is concerned, speak slowly and simply and do not overarticulate; finally, use of mimics, pantomime, gestures and the like is helpful.Specifically: aphasies all have word-finding difficulties and often use the wrong word. Some of them (Wernicke a.) have more speech and language fluency, others (Broca a.) have less, but this does not correlate with their capacity for understanding language. They can be emotionally disturbed, and they all need social communication. People who are hard of hearing obtain their language in-formation from both their ears and their eyes, through lip-reading, Make sure your mouth is clearly visible; avoid background noise, and keep your head still. With the deaf, misunderstandings are sometimes unavoidable: let your deaf part-ner handle such instances, for he has the experience. Be aware of the language disturbance (mostly syntactic) that can occur besides the poor speech. Finally: do not begrudge the deaf their own manual communication (if they want to use it) among themselves.